Project Meeting

I had one last meeting with Gianni today before the final hand in and presentations of the project. I discussed my progress so far with him and what I had achieved with the Augmented Reality and the web URLs and explained my issues with using flickr and the plans to find an alternative method of displaying web based images.

The idea of how the photo album itself was going to work was also discussed and the idea that book should act as an interface for not only displaying the images in a physical manner but how it could be used to change images and user interaction without the user having to use the computer as a method of main interaction.

Gianni suggested a few ideas that could work, such as using a mobile phone to assign images and then using the book to manipulate and display the images, or perhaps some alternative method to make the book itself more "playful" in its use.

Project Update

So now I have the AR markers displaying multiple images the next step is to decide where the web images that will be displayed will come from. I was hoping to use flickr as a source of web images for display in the photo album that could constantly change if the public timeline was used or have specific user galleries be displayed.

I tried to add the flickr api to the existing action script project with minimal success. The issue was with displaying multiple images on multiple markers with the type of code structure that the flickr api was designed with. Because of this I couldn't find a possible way to display a flickr api stream onto the AR Markers successfully so I have decided to set up the project to allow users to simply define image Urls to the project via an external source such as a text file or xml file that allows content to be defined and changed by the user.

Multiple AR Markers....Issues

After successfully loading an image to a single marker I needed to load multiple images to multiple markers. This is where I had some difficulty. I managed to find an extension of the FLARtoolkit called FLARManager, that is designed to enable multiple marker for multiple content display. I was lucky enough to find a further tutorial that showed how to create one 3D cube just like before but by using multiple markers it would create multiple instances of the one cube and assign a new color to each new instance. I needed to use something similar to this but rather than create multiple cubes, I needed multiple flat planes that would allow me to assign a different image to each rather than a colour. The tutorial was from http://rawkes.com/blog/2010/01/26/tracking-multiple-augmented-reality-markers-flarmanager-and-papervision#download

I managed to combine the work I had done previously with the image and the marker with the tutorial above and managed to get multiple markers to display the image from the previous post. The problem was that each marker displayed that one image so if I had three images on screen at once all three would be displaying the same image. I needed to find a method of assigning an image to each marker. After days of struggling and frustration at the lack of progress I went to see Ben Reynhart at Mutant Labs. He helped me out massively with this issue and showed me what was going wrong. I was close with my code in the sense that I had to assign an image to the detected marker, but just wasn't calling the function correctly. After seeing him it worked perfectly and each time a numbered marker was detected the corresponding image I set up would display to that marker alone! Next job was to replace the external image with web images, fortunately the BitMapFile material of PaperVision3D used to display the extenal images supports http urls so it was just a case of replacing the file paths with urls.

Working With Augmented Reality

So having no experience in using Augmented Reality i needed to find a good foundation to work from and build upon if I was to create a sucessful Augmented Reality Photo Album. Fortunately I found a few very useful tutorials about the basis of creating an AR application. I found a website called gotoandlearn.com this site is run by an Adobe flash developer Lee Brimelow who provides two AR tutorials to show the basics.

The first tutorial helped me to understand how to setup an action script project that would enable me to display a 3D cube on top of an AR marker and to create a webcam window as well as adding additional classes Papervision3D & FLARToolkit basically these two external libraries are what makes AR possible within action script. Papervision3D enables the creation and rendering of 3D objects directly from within Flash/action script without having to import basic 3D renders from another source. The FLARToolkit is what allows the Augmented Reality to occur and for the recognition of AR markers so that content can be associated with it.

I followed the first tutorial http://www.gotoandlearn.com/play?id=105 and this enabled me to learn how to setup AR and to add content in the form of a basic 3D cube. From here I found another tutorial that was alot more related to the area of content that my project was going to be based on. The tutorial again from gotoandlearn was an extended AR tutorial showing how to display a video on a flat 3D plane using an AR marker http://www.gotoandlearn.com/play?id=114 from this I was able to develop the code so instead of loading a video file it would allow me to load an external image file for display on the AR marker. Below is an screen shot of what I achieved.

The image moves with the symbol even when rotated so it acts in the same manner as a traditional photograph.

The next stage was to add more markers and more images to each marker to build a collection of images.