O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Everywhere you look, Augmented Reality is a hot topic. With MAX a little over a month away, FLAR will be thoroughly covered in at least 4 different sessions. I was offered an incredible opportunity by InsideRIA to speak at...

FLARManager is a lightweight framework that makes building FLARToolkit augmented reality applications easier. When I first came across FLARToolkit, I was simultaneously excited and stymied -- there seemed to be so much potential, but it was difficult to use and even harder to understand. Augmented reality is still a long way from maturity, and leveraging FLARToolkit on the ubiquity of Flash Player provides a great opportunity for further exploring its possibilities. FLARManager aims to provide quicker entry to the technology, to allow a focus on new forms of interaction via marker detection and augmented reality.

Augmented Reality has been a hot topic lately. I have recently been playing around with AR both in the Flash Player as well as my G1 Android phone. To this point, I can say that the technology is very cool but also has a lot of growing up to do.

The basic explanation of Augmented Reality is to superimpose graphics over real-world environments in realtime. In Flash, this is usually done with a webcam and a marker card. When you hold the card up to the webcam, Flash is able to detect the orientation of the marker and superimpose, in this case, a 3d model on top of it. This technology has been around for a while now and having access to it in Flash is really exciting. Although it is still in its infancy, over time the speed and power of AR will improve to hopefully play an important role in how we view the web. Now is a great time to get your feet wet in order to get a better understanding on how it works.