Does anyone know what the plausability of developing an augmented reality engine that works with blender animations would be?

For those that are new to the concept of Augmented Reality here is a brief explanation...

Augmented Reality (AR) is a LIVE intereactive experiance where the Physical world is combined with (generally) a 3D virtual world. The result is incredible!

I work for a Magazine Wholesaler and we have just started to distribute a Trading Card collection for DR WHO where a number of the cards have an AR capability. In order to use them, the user opens up their webcam and displays their card in front of it and, hey presto! Up pops a 3D image right infront of them on their computer monitor! Needless to say, its caught my attention!

What I would like to know is, would anyone be interested enough to try and develop such an engine to work with (or even be incorporated into) blender?! It would make blender stand out even further ahead of the rest of the 3D community!

Google it, Youtube it and feed your imagination! There are so many awesome possibilities with this, especially with the creative minds within the blender community!

Some more useful info and examples can be found at http://www.t-immersion.com/

I'd love to hear what you guys think around this, especially the developers up there in Blender HQ!

Cheers,

Dezzamondo

Hi,

you're not the first one asking whether Blender could be used for AR. Check these links:

http://www.ashsid.sk/wp/?p=117&lang=en-us

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=151469&highlight=artoolkit

http://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-76111.html

The links from the last thread seem to be dead though....

I haven't done anything with AR myself so far, so I'm not much of a help unfortunately...

Hi Dezzamondo, I created the AR assets for the Dr Who trading game you mentioed. Funnily I came across your post by accident. If its any help I used 3dsmax to create/model/texture/animate them and exported using a DAE exporter available online. It runs in Flash using Papervision so if Blender exports to DAE format you may be able to use a similar pipeline. Hope this helps.

pixeldamage wrote:

Hi Dezzamondo, I created the AR assets for the Dr Who trading game you mentioed. Funnily I came across your post by accident. If its any help I used 3dsmax to create/model/texture/animate them and exported using a DAE exporter available online. It runs in Flash using Papervision so if Blender exports to DAE format you may be able to use a similar pipeline. Hope this helps.

Hello pixeldamage:

I have been trying to use Blender to generate dae files and deploy the files in Flartoolkit. The problem is that my dae file won't show. Here is what I did:
1. create 3D model in Google S ketchup
2. export the file as 3ds file
3. import the 3ds file in Blender
4. save the file as a Blender file. (When I rendered the image of the model in Blender, it looked fine.)
5. export the file as dae file

I then deployed the dae file in Flartoolkit. Unfortunately, the model didn't show.

Do you have any idea what went wrong?

Any advices will be greatly appreciated.

lulu

Dezzamondo wrote:

Does anyone know what the plausability of developing an augmented reality engine that works with blender animations would be? I'd love to hear what you guys think around this, especially the developers up there in Blender HQ!

I also wanted to get AR to work, and, after finding a lot of dead links/projects (as already posted by someone here), I started to work on it myself;

http://josthalen.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/augmented-reality-in-blender-revisited/

It ain't pretty, but it works perfectly

My labmate Ludo has versions of our lab's ARtoolkit working in Blender through our ePMV plugin http://epmv.scripps.edu. The same toolkit running through the same plugin inside of Cinema 4D is shown at the bottom of this page:
http://epmv.scripps.edu/videos/structure2010