Over the past couple of months I’ve had the chance to get in a bit of research and development time with Unity, and one of the areas I have looked at is Augmented Reality. By far the most entertaining experiment so far has been my “AR Driving” demo. It could be said that this particular demo isn’t strictly AR (because it doesn’t overlay graphics on the video stream) but still, it uses AR technology to map the orientation of an AR marker to the steering, acceleration and braking of a car. I recently demoed it in our London office, result: Fun!

The demo works by reading the orientation of a single AR marker printed on an A4 sheet. The sheet is folded so that the marker is visible to the camera on one side, and a steering wheel image is visible on the other side – so the user knows which way up to hold the paper!

The rotation around the Z axis (as in, turning the steering wheel) is mapped to the car steering, although not entirely linearly – in order to make the controls easy to use it required a few tweaks, such as smoothing out the sometimes jittery raw data, and giving bias to a ‘not-quite-dead zone’ around the zero-degrees rotation area to make it easier to drive the car in a straight line.

The acceleration and braking controls are implemented by reading the “tilt” of the marker around the X axis. Holding the marker straight-on to the camera gives the equivalent of a steady gentle press on the accelerator. Tilting the top edge towards the camera pushes down the accelerator, while tilting it away releases the accelerator completely and applies the brakes.

The final result is a fairly intuitive driving control, and most people who had a try in the office seemed to find the car responsive and easy to control on their first try, as the video shows!

Ever since I joined Skive, I’ve been producing 3D games for the web, using Director and Shockwave (not to be confused with the Flash plug-in, which is sometimes referred to as “Shockwave Flash”). I started developing 3D games in 2002, and in the early days, Shockwave’s capabilities were so far ahead of its time that the main consideration was whether the average home user would even have the hardware required to run the game at all.

Some of the 3D Shockwave games we've produced at Skive

Since then however, much to the disappointment and frustration of many Shockwave developers, upgrades to Shockwave’s 3D and game-related capabilities have been almost completely negligible. At the time of writing, Shockwave still has pretty much the same 3D feature set that it had in 2001, and we are now in almost exactly the opposite situation, where most modern computers – even cheap home PCs – have advanced 3D graphic capabilities which the now antiquated Shockwave plug-in simply cannot make full use of.

Adobe claim that their long-term plans include making Director “the preferred environment for games creation”, however until they release a clear roadmap or a significant upgrade in this area, we can only speculate as to what this means.

I recently had the opportunity to research and evaluate some of the modern alternatives for a new project, and of these, “Unity 3D” emerged as a clear winner. I had been keeping an eye on a few of the 3D alternatives over the recent years, but it wasn’t until I actually got stuck in and started developing in Unity 3D that I realised the extent to which it feels ‘alive’ as a tool. The community is buzzing with new ideas and talent, the company is responsive and easily approachable, and the engine’s capabilities are modern and expansive.

Unity 3D - The Editor

As well as the obvious graphical advantages that come with a modern 3D engine, there are many other features which throw Director’s shortcomings into stark contrast. Here are just a few:

• Supports C#, a modern professional programming language. In addition, you can work on the code in Visual Studio, which sweetens things even more.
• Very active forums, with many Unity engineers and product specialists contributing regularly.
• A user feedback system where ideas and feature requests can be added and voted on. Members of the technical team actually comment on these ideas, and some of them do end up getting implemented!
• A public roadmap. They tell you what they’re working on, and roughly when it’s due for release.
• New communities are growing around the technology. People are tweeting and blogging about Unity. There are typically 40-80 users in the IRC channel at any given time (including regular Unity staff). By contrast, the community around Director feels as though it has been dwindling since around 2004, and of those remaining, a high percentage are old-timers.

So now, having completed my first (rather large) Unity 3D project, I’ve come away very impressed with Unity – with both the product itself, and with the company and community that comes with it! And on that note, I’m hoping to dedicate a little more time to such things as blogging about my experiences, experiments and research over the next few months.

A few of us here at Skive have banded together to create an Augmented Reality submission for this year’s e4 E Sting competition. For those of you not in the know, E Stings are the short clips that feature between the programs and adverts.

Anyway. Here’s what we came up with:

It was Lee Daley who suggested we make an AR entry. He also did the 3D work. Since then my fiance Juliet Lall has graced the project with some illustrations and Rakesh Mistry has taken control of the video production. I did all the Flash development and took the role of project leader.

15 E Stings will make it on-air and there have been over 750 entries. Let’s hope the lure of a free AR application will improve my chances!

Since my AR Business Card went viral (over 300,000 views to date) both myself and Skive have had a great deal of attention. Skive are currently working on, pitching and persuing around 7 AR flash projects for some big brands.

Myself, several other Actionscript developers and our 3D artist have been looking into FLARToolkit (the Flash AR code library) and are fully up to speed in this area. We are working on a few more viral videos and concept stuff and have produced a few examples, including our very own logo.

In addition to this we are dedicating time to research a variety of other AR approaches including colour and face detection and languages such as C++ and Objective C (iPhone).

So watch this space over the next couple of months, we should be releasing some fascinating, functional and playful AR applications.

Well, it’s been an interesting week to say the least. Although I have physically handed my new business card to only a handful of people it has reached enough to fill Wembly Stadium twice over.

About 6 weeks ago, in my spare time I created an Augmented Reality business card and posted it on my blog and Vimeo. I had a small initial rush of a couple of thousand views and then it quietened down. Standard story.

Then last week things went absolutely mental. By the end of the week I had had 40,000 hits on my blog and 180,000 views of my Video. I was being Tweeted something silly and blogged by such giants as Engadget, Popular Science, Gizmodo, Notcot, The Times and many others.

As a result, several big brands have approached me expressing an interest in working with Skive on Augmented Reality projects. I’ve had parties approach me for interviews, articles, tutorials and to be involved in books and conferences.

It was fascinating to see how interest in this piece of work evolved over several days. There was an absolute digital ripple effect. It seems that Twitter played a huge part in driving the success throughout. It’s great to see, first hand, social media acting as a vehicle for non-commercial work to gain such a huge audience in a small space of time.

So where to from here? I will be continuing to experiment using AR but in addition to investigating it at home I will be doing some more R&D work. So who wants an AR application? Form an orderly queue…

Duncan and Matthew attended Flash in the Can in Toronto in April - an intense four days of training, conferences and networking.

By the end both were fully loaded with new information, business cards and inspiration. The intellectual resilience to this sensory overload was telling, and on the final night Duncan let his hair down and partied within the inner sanctum of the FITC Leet, resembling a character from one of the sessions - Interactive Story Telling – Zos World;

Matthew sat in his hotel room wistfully tweeting about the background ambience of the Toronto Tamil protests – go figure.