Augmented Reality Sans Gnarly Markers
I’ve been playing with AR maker tracking for a few weeks and have developed a serious distaste for the markers themselves. They are like shitty QR codes and render the printed material you are trying to enhance pock marked with awful.
Sort of randomly today I stumbled on Natural Feature Tracking (NFT). Which is a more sensical name for something called Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF).
… [SURF is] a robust image descriptor, first presented by Herbert Bay et al. in 2006, that can be used in computer vision tasks like object recognition or 3D reconstruction. As basic image features it uses a Haar wavelet approximation of the determinant of Hessian blob detector.
Vlad Cazan Labs - Natural Feature Tracking (also wikipedia:SURF)
My end goal for this is mobile application, but for ease of prototype I’m jumping into Flash/Flex to see what I can do. Most of the uses in the wild I found for SURF came in Flash flavor, a lot of it utilized a for pay library from a Austrian company called Imagination (http://www.imagination.at). Their AustrianCubes demo for their flash*nft library is amazingly fast and smart. Their installations also totally blow me away. FLARManager has support for both flash*nft and flash*ar.
Now since I’m still in kind of a discovery phase, their one minute demo .swc was not going to cut it. Luckily, there is a less slick and entirely more open implementation of OpenSURF called ASSURF. Within minutes I had the rendered f360 sitting on a Pinocchio poster with hooks to multiple Flash 3D engines. I’m pretty thrilled about all of this.
Moving beyond that, OpenSURF has C++ and C# libs and super academic documentation. So I have high hopes for this really flying on a mobile platform.
