The Demo
Scan 1 of the 4 QR codes below with your mobile device. Here’s an Android Barcode app and a couple iPhone apps if you don’t already have one.
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The resulting link will take you to an augmented reality image marker. It doesn’t mean much by itself, but take a look at what can be done with this “QR to AR” method:
The Overview
NOTE: If you are totally unfamiliar with augmented reality, check out these previous posts: Augmented Reality and Augmented Reality with Away3dlite.
What’s one of the biggest blockers to augmented reality taking off? The difficulty in distributing the augmented reality markers necessary to make the technology work. If you’ve seen an augmented reality site, you’ve read the off-putting instructions to print an image to a sheet of paper to hold in front of your webcam. If you are a massive publication like Esquire, then its not so big of an issue.
But if you have no problem distributing AR markers, you probably aren’t reading this and don’t need my help. But if you do, you might want to try the “QR to AR” method of distribution shown at the top of this post. You should always offer the method of printing your AR marker, but with the widespread use of mobile technology, this is another viable method.
In short, the positive is that this method is easy to distribute and is more likely to be tried than with the “print this marker” method. The negative is that augmented reality is already a technology that depends heavily on a quality image. Consider the following when attempting to use the “QR to AR” method:
- Mobile phones can add difficulty with their reflective and glowing surface
- Good lighting and webcam quality is critical for the best possible augmented reality experience
- Disable auto-orient on your device, if possible, otherwise the image will turn when your phone does
This isn’t necessarily meant as a practical solution to augmented reality marker distribution and use, just a simple attempt to think outside the box. Hopefully it encourages people smarter than me to think of even more clever ways to bring augmented reality to the masses.
Special thanks to all techs involved here: FLARManager, FLARToolkit, Away3D, and my trusty Droid X using the .
[...] Via Savagelook.com [...]
I haven’t read your previous AR post but I’m going to now. Does this AR work with your cell phone camera?
Seth,
I use the cell phone camera with my barcode scanning app to scan the QR codes. The link presented by the barcode scanner takes me directly to the images I need to use the AR demo.
Hey Tony,
I’m not following this… when I use my QR code scanner, I just get the same paper images you have on your sheets of paper. How do I actually get these “second step” codes to present AR models?
Well done!
I had an ‘Inception’ moment when you generated the AR cube covered in QR codes.
@Evan: This is just a video demo displaying the concept. I don’t have a live version of the program I used to generate the video available.
@Sergio: Haha, yep, just as cool as ‘Inception’ *sarcasm*
I am able to scan the QR codes on my phone, but what software are you using on the computer (other than your webcam) to scan the augmented reality marker.
Good article – my company has produced by QR and AR tags for various projects and we can definitely appreciate the issues with distributing the AR markers. For our lastest project we handed out a ton of t-shirts with the AR tags on them. You can check out our project at animism.com if you’re interested in what we did.
Cheers,
Giselle
Is there an app I can use on my iPhone that will scan both QR and AR codes?
thanks for your sharing.I’ve know about the QR code generator for a long time and even have managed to generate different types of barcodes and even managed to generated several barcode by myself. I also searched some free online barcode genreators,such as http://www.keepautomation.com/ and it is very useful,too. But ,How can I print a free online barcode generator onto my products by using these barcode generators?