We are encouraging anyone interested in creating an alternate AR interaction to submit an application for others to experience. See below for more details.

APPLE USERS: The default video source on the Mac is not the built-in camera. To select the right camera you need to right click on the blank area (where the flash should be) and go to Settings in the menu. Select the Camera tab and choose USB camera from the drop down menu.

Download and print all four postcards:

Submit your own AR application

In the past year there has been considerable interest in academia and industry regarding Augmented Reality (AR) technologies and applications. Recent advancements in web and mobile technologies have made it possible to deploy AR applications and to enhance their content via social networking technologies such as Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. The field is still young and there is a need for HCI experts and designers to explore this space and to begin to understand how to create compelling user experiences that utilize AR. Therefore, you are invited to join us in an experiment in social networking and augmented reality. We are leveraging the vast CHI audience and a set of enhanced postcards to provide the community with an opportunity to create AR experiences for a large base of potential users.
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The enhanced CHI postcards have a marker (the black square with the pixilated icon inside of it) printed on them that can be used for recognition and tracking. There are initially four unique postcard designs (we may add more as more postcards are printed) which will allow designers to create applications that respond differently to each design or that utilize multiple cards in concert with each other. Any given person might have one or two, but is unlikely to have all of them. Be creative!

The application running above is a simple example of how to use the Flash AR Toolkit (FLARToolkit), was adapted from this tutorial and can serve as a starting point for your own creative endeavors. These markers can also be recognized by the ARToolkit, which runs on a wide variety of platforms (the pattern files are in the source to the example, linked above), so feel free to use other platforms or development environments if you prefer. We will also soon release a version of the ARToolkitPlus that can track these markers efficiently on mobile devices. We have provided example code and some links to other FLARToolkit projects to help inspire you. Whether you are a creator or a consumer of the resulting AR experiences we hope you enjoy this experiment!

Some practical notes about marker tracking. First, the entire marker (including the white space around the black square) must be in view of the camera for the tracking system to recognize it. Having a finger or other object occluding part of the marker will cause the tracking to fail. Low lighting, holding the marker at a very oblique angle, or fast movement of the marker may cause the tracking accuracy to degrade.

For more information on this AR experiment, or to submit your application, contact Blair MacIntyre (blair@cc.gatech.edu).

Submitted applications

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