Augmented Content Creation
May 28, 2014, Augmented World Expo, Santa Clara, CA—A set of speakers discussed content creation for AR. Among the challenges are lack of standard platforms and encoding formats.
Menno Ouweneel from Connectar described their offerings of content libraries and their business model. They charge a small fee for library access, and a fee for each und user activation of the content. Content can come from any source or app, and will interface with many content management tools. This source content gets modified with the company’s tools, moved to their cloud, and is then available for use. This function allows content to be pushed to users, so all the developer has to do is to create the tags or markers for existing content to make it available for AR.
Richard Ferraro from Catchoom talked about best practices for creating actionable content. Their tools perform image recognition and AR for content creation to go beyond wow to actionable by providing value to the users. The tools link images to e-commerce and mobile apps to enable a direct user response to AR content.
The tools and functions can craft experiences by recognizing objects and pop-up AR content through support of most 3-D models. The creation of AR uses the image recognition capabilities to interface to the content management services and analytics. The tools include a mobile SDK and APIs for popular OSs.
The creation of AR content should incorporate 3-D models and virtual buttons. Especially for mobile, try to work with low polygon counts, combine models to reduce draw cells, and use normal smoothing. Don’t overpopulate the scene or go above the ceiling. For complex 3-D models, get help from an expert in modeling. For best effects, keep everything simple, and determine if image recognition is sufficient or is AR needed.
Rob Manson from BuildAR presented a web-based AR platform that works with standard browsers. The creation and modification tools are also browser-based. This concept changes the way developers think about and implement AR functions. In existing platforms, there is constant need to explain the function, link to an app store for the proper AR reader, and search for content. The flow is of low value for most users and has too many hand-off points, which leads to low usage.
If, instead, the content is delivered over the Web to smart and wearable devices, the AR content is more widely available and useable around the world. The growing geo-location capabilities of the mobile devices and AR viewers like the Rift, coupled with access through a standard browser enable good AR content to be available to everyone anywhere. It is possible to float images on top of a smart phone video capture or viewer while inside the browser. Then the marker-based AR tracking functions can operate and deliver the content. The tool kit includes APIs for interfaces for other controllers like the Leap, rift, and for cameras. The HTML5 links and WebGL modules change the way to create and distribute AR content.
Gheric Speiginer from GA Tech presented spatially adaptive AR functions. Most AR depends upon knowledge of the world, and use levels of models. This information is static, and hard to query and use for designs. As an alternative, a top-down flow uses AR for world knowledge similar to a windows manager. This approach adjusts content based on settings of the viewer.
The bottoms-up approach presents world knowledge to the designer as metrics like orientation, image recognition, tracking, sensing, etc. in response to queries. They developed new languages called Argon and Argon JS to address the needs to support all platforms and arrays of sensors. The developer can access a full matrix of metrics when developing code.
For example, a zoom density effect keeps text size constant with changes in image size. The data can remain in the proper alignment independent of orientation through adaptation of angles of view, distance fro the screen, and other spatial relationships. Adding a control flow allows the AR to adapt to the viewer’s device.
