Progress made to the Augmented Reality Toolkit. Now a static library!

Today we're please to announce that we've updated the source code on Github.  The latest set of changes made this week fixes  the orientation issue that's been driving me nuts.

A Static Library - Finally!

The project now has the core of the toolkit put into a static library.  Why is this important? In the future when this project has matured, it will allow anyone to add the library to their projects.

We've still have a long way to go. One of the changes we want to have is the ability for any type of view to be added to augmented Reality layer.

Orientation works in both landscape and portrait modes

Woot! We finally got this one piece of code figured out.  It really came down to some simple math.  When the orientation of the phone changes, we need to adjust the azimuth.  We also fixed a stupid mistake where we were checking the same orientation direction instead of checking the left AND right.

The final a-ha moment came in the determining the angle of the phone to know where to draw the y position of a view.

   1:  switch (currentOrientation) {

   2:    case UIDeviceOrientationLandscapeLeft:

   3:       viewAngle = atan2(acceleration.x, acceleration.z);

   4:       break;

   5:   

   6:    case UIDeviceOrientationLandscapeRight:

   7:       viewAngle = atan2(-acceleration.x, acceleration.z);

   8:       break;

   9:   

  10:    case UIDeviceOrientationPortrait:

  11:       viewAngle = atan2(acceleration.y, acceleration.z);

  12:       break;

  13:   

  14:    case UIDeviceOrientationPortraitUpsideDown:

  15:       viewAngle = atan2(-acceleration.y, acceleration.z);

  16:       break;

  17:   

  18:    default:

  19:       break;

  20:  }

As you can see, determining the angle we need to use the y acceleration in portrait mode and the x acceleration in landscape mode.  However, there was one more thing we had to do to make sure the functionality behaved the same way, regardless of the orientation.  We needed to adjust the  x value as negative when the iPhone is in Landscape Right and the y value when the iPhone is upside down. (Not sure why one would do it upside down but we added the functionality anyways!)

Scaling issue resolved!

We finally go the scaling of the views working now too! The funny thing all we had to do was uncomment out the code we had commented out before and it started working.  The problem was solved by another bug we fixed a while back but forgot to uncomment the block code that was scaling the views down to nothing.

What's next?

Now that we have the bare minimum working now by simplifying the code and getting it to work for all orientations and adding it to a static library, we can now get to the fun part.  Making it into a real toolkit.  

I don't recommend forking the project just yet because I still see a ton of refactoring that will go on from the project we forked from to get it to an acceptable toolkit.  My big projects are slowing down a bit right now so I feel I can spend a little more on this project than I had the first couple of weeks of the year.

Stay tuned. The best is yet to come!

Augmented Reality Toolkit for the iPhone on GitHub

A couple of weeks ago I got very interested in doing an Augmented Reality Application for the iPhone and one of business partners had a great idea for a game.  Instead of starting from scratch I decided to see if there was any existing open source projects I could use as base.

I started searching on GitHub and found a very good start of a toolkit.  I downloaded the original code and really liked where it was going.  However there were several things I felt I could do to make the code a bit less complicated and say many ways to improve it!

I've forked the original project and have begun to make the many changes I think could make it into a better toolkit.  I want to thank the original developers for getting me started and doing some of the heavy lifting.

I plan on blogging about the changes I've made and what I plan on adding to the toolkit. 

This should allow me to create the application I'm interested in making but also provide everyone who is interested a great toolkit to make their own projects as well.

It currently has a long way to go but now that I have the code in a manner that I want, I can really start adding the code to make this great!

You can check out the project on GitHub.com