iPhoneARKit and Point Of Interest apps on iPhone

A point of interest, or POI, is a specific point location that someone may find useful or interesting. An example is a point on the Earth representing the location of the Space Needle, or a point on Mars representing the location of the mountain, Olympus Mons.

The term is widely used in cartography, especially in electronic variants including GIS, and GPS navigation software. In this context the synonym waypoint is common.

(from wikipedia)

iPhoneARKit is a great tool for developing POI (Point Of Interest) apps on iPhone. We've just done the first demo based on this library. It's a simple application to detect POI locations in camera view and show related information (in the context of this demo - is shops with coupons)

Bee Buzz Finder from Vinh Nguyen on Vimeo.

Many business ideas comes from this, right?

Playing augmented reality with my business card

Augmented Reality is one of topics that I am doing research. I choose a simple demo to make this topic more interesting: playing with business card.
The target of the demo is: playing a video after detecting the marker on the business card.

FlarManager is the library that I choose to work because it's very flexible and easy to use. It wraps FlarToolkit and make it works with many Flash 3D engines: Sandy, Papervision3D, Away3D,...
This is the result:

Below is list of step that I did to make this demo run:
Step 1: Download FlarManager. You can get its source code from SVN here.
Step 2: Configure FlexBuilder and setup the project to build the whole source code of FlarManager (just follow steps in this tutorial)
Step 3: Capture my business card and print out the logo of my company.
Step 4: Use this online tool to create marker from the printed logo. After finishing this step, we get the output is a pattern file using in recognizing the marker under camera. You should save the output file with .pat extension (example: mylogo.pat). You must remember the resolution of your pattern for using in configuration of next steps.

Step 5: Open the FlarManager project by FlexBuilder, the FLARManagerTutorial_Collada.as is the default running demo. So, I choose this file to customize the code. I am very lazy and don't want to do any complex thing. He he
Step 6: Configure the marker.
+ Copy our .pat file into resource folder (or any places in your project).
+ Go to \resources\flarConfig.xml, add your pattern file location in the patterns section.

Step 7: Go to the FLARManagerTutorial_Collada.as file and write code to load video and play it on a plane. This is a very simple task for any Flash developer.

Step 8: Play the video when the marker is detected. To do this, you just need to add the Plane as child of this.activeMarker. FlarManager did everything and return to us the activeMarker in correct position. So, we just add our game above the active marker and play.


Do you want to have a special an AR business card with your own logo? He he, try this.

Research topic for this month: iPhone AR

AR is not a new technology nowadays. However, its applications are very interesting and useful. To adapt the market trend, I decide to have a quick look into AR technology on iPhone.

Below is a very interesting demo that I've found on Internet.




Some quick notes for iPhone AR technology

Third party providers provide us solution to build iPhone AR app

1. iPhone ARKit: open source iphone AR
Ref links:
http://github.com/zac/iphonearkit/
http://www.iphonear.org/
http://code.google.com/p/iphonearkit/


2. SREngine
SREngine stands for Scene Recognition Engine, which is a software engine to recognize static scenes of architectures, streets, posters, rooms, and so on. Due to the ability to specify what user is.



3. ARToolKit v4.4 iPhone
The ARToolKit v4.4 is the first fully-featured AR framework that supports native operation on Apple iPhone, which lets you create applications with sample real world imagery captured with your iPhone camera, and merges them with software-generated 3D objects. The ARToolKit is also well integrated with the accelerometer of the iPhone, which allows it to automatically detect movements from the iPhone, and impose those movements on 3D images instantaneously.


4. D'Fusion Mobile - a solution provided by T-Immersion company
(http://demos.t-immersion.com/)
D’Fusion mobile will operate seamlessly on Symbian and Windows devices, with iPhone and Android support following thereafter. Providing a simple and user friendly experience on mobile phone Total Immersion offers turn key solutions adapted to your needs. Put your smartphone in front of a marker and get a unique 3D Augmented Reality experience!

5.Metaio Mobile
Link: http://www.metaio.com/products/mobile/

Unifeye Mobile is a glimpse of the (virtual/real) future - through the viewfinder of your cell phone's camera! With Unifeye Mobile, metaio is developing the first fully-integrated Augmented Reality software for mobile devices.

Latest news from Apple with AR technology:

Link: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/07/augmented-reality-coming-to-iphone-with-iphone-os-31.ars

Developers should be able to use official APIs in iPhone OS 3.1 to create so-called "augmented reality" apps for the iPhone 3GS, according to comments from one developer. Already, developers are trying to find uses for such apps