An Augmented Reality Library for Mobile Phones and its Application for Recycling

Background

In this section, we focus on available tools for developing applications for PCs and also for mobile devices. There are several tools for the development of AR for PCs, but there are not many for mobile devices. Related to PCs, the most well-known library is ARToolKit. ARToolKit is a vision tracking library that enables the easy development of a wide range of AR applications. It was developed at the University of Washington by Kato & Billinghurst (1999). ARToolKit is made available freely for non-commercial use under the GNU General Public License. Commercial licenses for professional implementation of ARToolKit are also available. Commercial licenses are administered by ARToolworks, Inc., Seattle, WA, USA. The required elements for an AR application developed using ARToolKit are: a USB or FireWire camera, and a marker. ARToolKit uses computer vision techniques to obtain the position and orientation of the camera with respect to a marker. Virtual elements are drawn on these markers. ARToolKit includes code for image acquisition, the detection of markers in the video stream, the calculation of the three-dimensional position and orientation of the markers, the identification of markers, the computation of the position and orientation of the virtual objects relative to the real world, and the rendering of these virtual objects in the corresponding video frame. Other tools have incorporated ARToolKit as plugin, for example:

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  DART (Designer’s Augmented Reality ToolKit) (MacIntyre et al., 2003). It is based on Macromedia Director.

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  AMIRE (Authoring Mixed Reality) (Abawi et al., 2004). It includes different localization systems. ARToolKit was included in its first prototype. It includes 3D graphic libraries such as OpenSceneGraph.

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  OsgART (Looser, 2007). It also includes OpenSceneGraph.

Other PC tools are the following: