Finishing Touches

The project has now been modified to allow for multiple markers and simultaneous augmentations, and all that is left is the collaboration process. Animations and models created by the first year students will now be added to the Augmentation code provided by the second year students, to create the final product.

AR in Industry

With Augmented Reality, the lines between what is art, what is a commercial application, and what is an academic application are blurred - the technology is new, so the exploration of the topic is rather undefined. For example, all industrial applications could be perceived as somewhat arty and academic - it's hard to split the applications into distinct categories, as they are mostly interlinked. I'm going to be looking at a few various ways AR is used.

One commercial application of AR is the game for the PSP console, Invizimals. The objective of the game is to catch, level up, and battle creatures. The creatures are 'hunted' down by using a camera designed to be used with the PSP. The creatures are captured in the 'real world', with the camera taking the image in front of it (for example, your desk) and relaying it to the PSP's screen. Varying creatures are spawned, determined by the colour of surfaces and the time of day.
The creatures are 'captured' by placing a marker in front of the camera, on the creature.

AR has the potential to be a great way of gaming. Invizimals is a step in the right direction, but there are still a lot of rough edges. The game has been one of the first to really use AR as the main point of the game. Other consoles (Nintendo's 3DS) are beginning to use AR in some of their games too. However, right now, the use of AR with gaming is in it's early stages. There is a lot of potential here, and hopefully it will be improved upon in the next few years.

AR can also improve more traditional games. For a direct example to the project, Traditional Pokemon cards could be provided with AR codes, and can played with in the conventional format in front of a webcam, whilst running an AR application. This adds a new novel touch to the cards, and can potentially boost interest and sales. Nintendo were originally playing card manufacturers, therefore this project brings the development of the industry full-circle and holds a nostalgic appeal in this 'past meets present' approach.

The Next Stage

Now that the project has a basic form of Augmented Reality, this needs to be developed so that multiple markers can be used simultaneously, and feature animation. Whilst multiple markers are being implemented, Animated creatures are currently being created to feature on the markers. The project is now being created completely in Adobe Flash, by using the animation features readily available with the program and the FLARtoolkit, a software library for building Augmented Reality (AR) applications.