We first posted about Augmented Reality way back in April 2009. Since then, we’ve been extremely excited by its potential in workplace learning and recently our innovation team has been trying out various SDKs/classes. AR applications around the world are being developed using FLARToolKit, LAYAR, UNIFEYE, D-fusion platform etc. So far, we’ve implemented FLARToolKit and LAYAR in AR application development at Upside.
It gives us immense pleasure to share our first real sample in AR Street Racing. Street Racing is a simple car controller ‘game’ (well, the game part is still under development) where you have to control the marker like a car steering to steer the car and avoid hitting obstacles. The idea of developing this game came from this YouTube video of similar AR application. While that was built using D-fusion platform, ours is built in Flash using AS3.0 classes – FLARToolKit and FLARManager. Both the AS3.0 classes are free to use for non-commercial projects under GNU General Public License, Version 3. FLARToolKit is the main AR class that identifies the marker and determines its position and orientation in real world while FLARManager is a plugin that makes it easy to develop the AR application using FLARToolKit. Note: FLARManager has good tutorials, documentation and also it’s very easy to use.
Here is a short video to demonstrating its working:
Instructions to play the game –
1. Click ALLOW on “Flash Player settings” popup
2. Download and print the marker using DOWNLOAD MARKER
3. Click START. The START button would be activated after successful camera detection. Make sure that the camera is not being used by any other application.
4. Use the marker to play the game. Your aim is to avoid as many obstacles as possible.
5. Scoring : -5 points for ever obstacle you hit and +10 points for every obstacle you avoid.
Enjoy the game and please share your suggestions in the comments section on what we should do in the next stage of development to make it better.
Addendum: Wednesday, March 03, 2010: 3:15 PM IST
Amy Blankenship (http://twitter.com/amyblankenship) replied to our AR post “@UpsideLearning I’m confused…how is this Augmented Reality?” She’s got a point, its confusing because the application is somewhere between Augmented Reality and Augmented Virtuality. It’s not truly AR because the application does not superimpose any sort of data on a view of reality. We keep calling it an augmented reality application because it uses the FLARManager and FLARTtoolkit, and these are augmented reality libraries. Lesson learned, from this point on, we’ll be careful about what we call stuff released into the wild. On another note, we are actually experimenting with true augmented reality applications as well. We’re building a local layer for our city that’ll run in the Layar AR browser, and some other neat stuff.
