Visit Bluhalo; Augmented Reality Style!

For my own interest, a little while ago I began creating a simple internal Augmented Reality (AR) app, (this development wound up being the inspiration for my blog entry about Augmented Reality a couple of weeks ago). We often invite potential clients down to meet us and see where we work. With this in mind, it seemed appropriate to me to use a plan of the office and to pop it up on the blog.

While the ‘final product’ is very rough (tinkering during lunch breaks isn’t really conducive to terrific results!), it is a reasonable proof of concept and has left me in a substantially better position to approach this kind of work for client projects. More importantly, it means I have to write a lot less to supply a blog entry :-)

It goes without saying that you need a webcam for this to work (a reasonable quality one will give more reliable results too), and you will need flash installed as well. As with most AR apps doing the rounds online at the moment, you need to print out the pattern (http://www.bluhalo.com/swf/Data/marker.pdf) and show it to your webcam.

You will need to keep it flat, and if possible out of harsh light sources or the recognition suffers. Other than that, be aware that it might be slow to download on poorer connections and that performance of this rough version is very dependant on your computer.

So, welcome to Bluhalo's office! (If you don't have a web cam, you can get a sneak preview below!)

Here's a screen shot of the AR app in action...

Nick Nawrattel
Lead Multimedia Developer