NaofanCreation Uses ARtisan To Create Augmented Reality in Second Life

We now have a new genre - Augmented Virtual Reality!

NaofanCreation, a French developer of Second Life addons, has posted a YouTube video of ARtisan integration with a video feed from the virtual world.

Augmented Reality - Beyond Eye Candy

Augmented Reality has officially met the blogosphere. On Twitter alone, there can be as many as fifty posts per hour linking to demonstrations. Our beloved technology is leaving the playpen of developer forums and moving to the boardrooms of major corporations, but at what cost? For, with the exception of mobile GPS/Compass applications like Layar and TwitAround, most recognition based demos hitting the mainstream (that aren't post production video effects for "concept" pieces) have one thing in common - they're just browser based eye candy.

For now, visual examples get your company recognition. In a genre that has few applications accessible to the public, the "wow" effect goes a long way. In a few months, though, AR will be somewhat common in the mainstream. The average person is going to have the same mind set that people in the know about the technology already have - why waste the time printing a marker just to see a cheesy 3D model pop out? The obvious direction for developers attempting to position themselves in AR is to begin making fully interactive applications, and the tech is available.

Imagine the ability to go to a URL, launch a Flash application, and control a character through an AR adventure game, or drive a car with nothing more than a paper steering wheel. Right now, while most platforms don't have practical uses of these concepts, Flash AR does. Flash also adds a level of consumer access unavailable to any other AR capable plug-in, in that over 85% of computers already have it installed. In essence, FLARToolkit is poised to be the dominant platform for Augmented Reality.

Most people don't keep up with the latest AR releases, while even less know how it works, in the first place. It's the job of the developer to enlighten others of the possibilities of Augmented Reality with Flash. When an executive says that he wants to break into AR by putting a character on a marker and having it dance around, the smart developer says, "sure, but we can do more than that."

via WeAreOrganizedChaos

Business Card with ARtisan

Since everyone in the blogosphere seems to be going AR business card crazy, I thought I'd offer up a video demonstration of my personal card.

Check it out here.

Feedback on ARtisan

ARtisan has been out for just over 48 hours now and already we're getting some good feedback:

"Development tools such as this are important in moving AR to the maintstream." - Augmentify

"The goal of the site is commendable because it will allow latecomers to the AR scene a chance to catch up quickly with their examples and coding for FLARToolkit and Papervision3D." - The Future Digital Life

"This is pretty neat stuff..." - Oinkfrog

"The results look impressive..." - VizWorld

"Really easy to use!" - RainWorld via Twitter

"...a fun flash library to make augmented reality very simple." - Korben

For more information on ARtisan, visit the project page.

ARtisan 1.0 Is Here

OneZeroThrice is excited to announce the launch of ARtisan, the quickest and easiest solution for fully interactive Augmented Reality experiences in Flash.

ARtisan's ability to deliver the locations and rotations of multiple markers, with no extra work from the developer, allows new Augmented Reality concepts to be prototyped in minutes. Developers no longer have to learn any of the complicated inner workings of marker detection through FLARToolkit, just tell the framework the preferred format and marker results will be delivered automatically.

Using a marker as a steering wheel.

Additionally, ARtisan is provided by OneZeroThrice completely free of charge (commercially or non-profit), under the GNU General Public License, reducing the licensing cost of a closed source Flash Augmented Reality project to a commercial license of FLARToolkit. ARtisan also comes packaged with Papervision3D, so developers don't need to aggregate any other frameworks to create three dimensional, browser based Augmented Reality applications.

A 3D Mouse using a single marker.

To get ARtisan, play with interactive Augmented Reality examples, and create new and exciting interactive, browser based experiences, go to the ARtisan Homepage. You can also go directly to the project's Google Code page to download the source code.

3D Mouse Example with ARtisan

ARtisan 1.0 Preview