These days its seems everyone is coming out with applications that help build some form of AR application. I’ve listed a few below.
You have a bunch of products that say they make it easy to build AR applications. For example:
- Unifeye SDK: It looks like it is a COM based marker driven SDK. Don’t know much more about this yet.
- ARToolworks: They license the commercial versions of ARToolkit, osgArt, FLARToolkit, and NyArtoolkit. They are also promising a toolkit for the IPhone (ARToolkit v4.4).
- ARTag: A C#/C++ based library focusing on marker driven AR. Regretfully it seems to neither be for sale nor open source. It does seem that the SDK is available hereif you have bought the creator’s book.
In the open source world, there are quite a few applications and SDKs to help build AR applications:
- ARToolkit: The original toolkit for building marker based AR applications. It seems that most of the other libraries mentioned here have taken code or ideas from this library. It comes with pretty good tutorials (for an open source app). There is C++ code for position tracking, marker tracking, hooking into graphics libraries, and VRML rendering.
- ARToolkitPlus: A newer C++ Library for marker positioning and tracking. Works with the ARToolkit to improve marker and video related functionality. This library has been superseded by Studierstube Tracker.
- osgArt: A toolkit that mixes openSceneGraph and the ARToolkit to deal with AR video integration, spatial tracking, and ‘photometric registration’.
- NyArtoolkit: Various language ports of the original ARToolkit including Java and C#.
- FLARToolkit: An ActionScript 3 Flash port of the ARToolkit (really a port of the NyArtoolkit for Java).
- Touchless SDK: A 'sort of ‘ augmented reality application that uses the same tracking principles as other AR apps to track colors and control onscreen functionality (e.g. a mouse) or overlaying virtual objects. This fairly active windows based application has components in both C# and C++ (WebCam wrapper).
- GoblinXNA: Marker based AR framework written in C# for a Microsoft XNA environment (i.e. XBOX Live and Windows). This framework actually leverages a variety of other open source libraries to make the AR samples work (including ARTag, Newton, and lidgren).
As I write this I am still accidently finding other work that is AR related:
- TBeta: An application that tracks hand movements and potentially other multi-touch scenarios. Its a multiplatform application describing linux, Mac, Windows, and Flash support. I’ll have to check it out to see what the varying platforms are composed of when its source is released.
- Studierstube, Studierstube ES, Studierstube Trackerand related libraries : Looks like closed source C++ based libraries for desktop and mobile devices but not too sure.
More to come later!