Augmented Reality Leaps Forward
The Designer’s Augmented Reality Toolkit (DART) is an enhancement to Director MX that includes real-time video, various sensors, and wizarding methods to support creativity in mixed and augmented reality. You can learn more on the DART website:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/dart/
We’ve seen augmented reality applications before, but they were always custom-built affairs. People will remember the earlier Augmented Reality attempt “Facade”, which got quite a bit of press at the time. The problem was that the obvious question, “can I play it”, had a disappointing answer.
This is a little different. We can download this software, and we can produce an augmented reality of our own. In the same way that YouTube made it possible to easily video blog, Flash made it possible to easily animate and Second Life made it possible to easily create a virtual environment, this makes it possible to easily create an augmented reality experiment.
Nobody really knows what to do with augmented reality yet it seems, but that’s ok. Nobody had a clue what blogging was going to be used for either. Now, however, the next phase can begin. People who are idly curious about what Augmented Reality could be used for can start experimentation, and new ways of implementing it will start to roll out. The DART platform won’t just spawn a bunch of applications, but it will also inspire the need for more user-friendly, flexible and feature-rich platforms.
Expect a cellphone-based augmented reality GPS mashup application that you can download for a few dollars in the next few years.
