On popular demand an update of the SSTT visualizer Augmented Reality (AR) tool will be out soon. There are a number of features which will make it way more usable.

Sometimes reinventing the wheel is necessary - but only if the benefits outweigh fixing other tools available. Thus, I am currently working on reviving my TAP library which I developed since 1998 and stopped around 2005/06 - so a whopping 10 years old code partly but the basic principle I used just shows its strength now. TAP was basically an immediate mode SceneGraph with OpenGL and DirectX backend. The library strongly differentiated between the actual graph and the rendering backend (as other libraries do).

Following the announcements from Barcelona there are only a few interesting devices coming up which could make the difference for Augmented Reality on mobile phones. The Toshiba TG01 seems to be heavily optimized for media delivery, 3D and therefore brings hopefully some good number crunching capabilities. However, Toshiba was never a major player in the mobile phone market - it would be interesting to see how the market develops for them but I would suspect we are not seeing many of their devices. On the other hand the line-up from HTC, which apparently produces 80% of all Windows Mobile devices, is good but not really a leap forward in terms of media capabilities. There are some good improvements on the HTC touch diamond - it seems they got rid of that horrible plastic cover on the back and thus the camera - good for AR applications: we can see properly now - thanks HTC. The other interesting player is Acer which is making a big comeback with their line of OpenGL ES enabled phones.

Thank you to all the brave users out there helping to iron out the usual beta kinks out of the SSTT Visualizer. There will be soon an update adding a lot of interesting 3D visualization features, authoring and first and foremost more robust tracking. And there is more to come ...

After a bit of tinkering around my website is now on a new server which hopefully provides a bit more performance than the old one. There is nothing worse than users having a hard time to get information on such a small site such as this one.

There are various projects that have proven that mobile phones are a viable platform for Augmented Reality. So here is my take on it with an afternoon quick-hack of porting my SSTT library to the Windows Mobile platform.

All the best to my readers and passers by. As you might realize it looks a bit different here around but my first mission will be to port my theme over to the new Drupal 6 system.

After the SSTT Visualizer release, there are a few things on the tracking side - for instance introduce real NFT and port to various mobile hardware (almost finished for iPhone and Windows Mobile). Progress is a bit slow because my Post-Doc job is demanding some other development in the next few months. However, there also interesting things at the high level AR which always somehow relate back to the underlying technology:

This is a first trial to see how the SSTT library performs on various and random user hardware. Please give it a spin and tell me about your experiences. You find the download down here.

Somebody should have told them that just slapping some content which itself doesn't represent anything spatial doesn't work with AR. And heavy Kalman filters there anyway: what a whobble in more than one meaning.