In 1965, Ivan Sutherland developed a technology that made it possible to overlay virtual images on the real world. Attaching two head worn miniature Cathode Ray Tubes (CRT) to a mechanical tracker he created the first display known as Head-Mounted Display (HMD). With this technology of display users could see a simple virtual wireframe cube layover in our real world, as the first AR interface born. The term AR is often used to refer to interfaces in which two and three-dimensional computer graphics are superimposed over real objects, typically viewed through head-mounted or handheld displays.
In 1994, the context of AR, often the term “Mixed Reality” (MR) is used. It is a superset of AR and covers the reality-virtuality continuum between completely real environments and completely virtual environments, a concept introduced by Milgram and Kishino, which encompasses both AR and Augmented Virtuality (AV). The degree of how much both elements between virtual and real objects, are within an MR application, define its classification as either AR or AV. Azuma and friends provide an in-depth review of current and past AR technology and applications in their research.
Introduction to ARTOOLKIT
ARToolKit is a software library for building Augmented Reality (AR) applications....
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Read Documentation more...
Creating your own Augmented Reality application - I will provide AR tutorial soon....
Installation
ARToolkit 2.70 with VRML support
The latest version is available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/artoolkit and includes the following files:
ARToolkit-2.70.tgz Platform independent
DsVideoLib-0.0.4-win32.zip i386
OpenVRML-0.14.3-win32.zip i386
The ARToolKit is a collection of libraries, utilities applications, and documentation and sample code. The libraries provide the user with a means to capture images from video sources, process those images to optically track markers in the images, and to allow compositing of computer-generated content with the real-world images and display the result using OpenGL (Phillip Lamb, 2004). ARToolKit is designed to build on Windows, Linux, SGI Irix, andMacintosh OS X platforms.
Hardware
* Camera (your webcam)
* Marker (Pattern need to register your 3D object (.vrml) to be rendered for 3D augmentation)
Building on Windows
(Read the full release notes on Sourceforge for other platforms)
Prerequisites:
* Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 , Visual Studio 6 (Also Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008)
* DSVideoLib-0.0.4-win32. Download from http://sf.net/projects/artoolkit
* GLUT. Download from http://www.opengl.org/resources/libraries/glut.html
* DirectX 9.0b or later SDK. If you are using VS6, you must use 9.0b as DirectX 9.0c no longer includes support for VS6. Download from http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/downloads/list/directx.asp
* (DirectX 9.0c October 2004 or later only) DirectX SDK Extras package. Once downloaded and unzipped, move the "Samples" folder into the top-level of the installed SDK path.
* (Optional, for VRML renderer only) OpenVRML-0.14.3-win32. Download from http://sf.net/projects/artoolkit.
Build steps:
1. Unpack the ARToolKit zip to a convenient location. This location will be referred to below as {ARToolKit}.
2. Unpack the DSVideoLib zip into {ARToolKit}.
3. Copy the files DSVideoLib.dll and DSVideoLibd.dll from{ARToolKit}\DSVideoLib\bin.vc70 into {ARToolKit}\bin.
4. Run the script {ARToolKit}\DSVideoLib\bin.vc70\register_filter.bat.
5. Install the GLUT DLL into the Windows System32 folder, and the library and headers into the VS platform SDK folders.
6. Run the script {ARToolKit}\Configure.win32.bat to create include/AR/config.h.
7. Open the ARToolKit.sln file (VS.NET) or ARToolkit.dsw file (VS6).
8. Open the Visual Studio search paths settings(Tools->Options->Directories for VS6, or Tools->Options->Projects->VC++Directories for VS.NET) and add the DirectX SDK Includes\ path and theDirectX Samples\C++\DirectShow\BaseClasses\ path to the top of the search path for headers, and the DirectX SDK Lib\ path to the top of thesearch path for libraries.
9. (Optional, only if rebuilding DSVideoLib). Build the DirectShow baseclasses strmbase.lib and strmbasd.lib. (More information can be found atThomas Pintarics homepage for DSVideoLib(http://www.ims.tuwien.ac.at/~thomas/dsvideolib.php)).
10. Build the toolkit.The VRML renderering library and example (libARvrml & simpleVRML) are optional builds:
11. Unpack the OpenVRML zip into {ARToolKit}.
12. Copy js32.dll from {ARToolKit}\OpenVRML\bin into {ARToolKit}\bin.
13. Enable the libARvrml and simpleVRML projects in the VS configuration manager and build.
Screenshot
Debug folder:
