Skip to main content

Free Web based Augmented Reality (AR)

This post is part of the materials for a session on Augmented Reality presenting at the 2019 SolSTICE eLearning and CLT Conference 5-6th June 2019 Edge Hill University https://www.edgehill.ac.uk/solstice/files/2019/05/2019-Book-of-Abstracts.pdf  and the #MergedFutures Event on 14th June 2019.
1. Introduction





                                                                                
So if we go to
https://thimbleprojects.org/scottturneruon/692403

Using the markers above with this url running on your device (with a camera enabled) it should add two new objects over the markers. you will need a copy of these images and printed them out. If you have it I would suggest running it in Firefox.

2. Getting Started
The guide for all this is https://aframe.io/blog/arjs/, with this you have pretty much everything you need.



To start your own go to https://glitch.com/ -> new project ->Hello World project

In the index.html deleted everything in there and replace it with

Should have a white box over the Hiro marker when the web camera/phone/tablet is shown the markers.


The code  not in bold below just sets it up - to play with it we don’t need to worry about what it does - we can just use it. The bit in bold is the bit initially we change or add to – in this case it puts a default white box over the marker.






It can be seen at https://decisive-cookie.glitch.me

3. Playing with other objects

Now if we replace


With


We get a blue ball in place of the box


Now for some fun
http://www.pngall.com/bee-png/download/84 is a bee image – download it


Go back to Glitch, and if we go to assets we can add the image. Open up the folder that has the downloaded image and drag it into the asset window.

When it stops downloading and shows the image, click on the image to get the new web address we are going to need that next. so take a copy of it.

If we replace


With the following by just adding in src="https://cdn.glitch.com/04b86bba-0978-4bf4-b3a7-2ece72336f90%2FBee-PNG.png" as below
 


We get a blue ball with a bee stretched over it. But it doesn’t look that great if we remove the color=”blue” we see the bee stuck at the bottom of the ball still but the colours are back.


Now if we replace
    


With commands to rotate the sphere

We get a rotating sphere with the image on it.

This can be found at https://simplistic-wakeboard.glitch.me and works with the Hiro marker


If you want to find out how I felt about presenting go to https://dandy-custard.glitch.me/



Now let's try a GIF
https://giphy.com/gifs/ar-vr-uon-dWsKM0qQeY9DhSUslT/media


Download the GIF and then copy (drag and drop) into the asset folder of your project  get the web address and put into src=”” in place of the one that is there already

An example can be found at https://root-reply.glitch.me/ and works with the Hiro marker.




4. Issues and Thoughts

  • Make sure all the markers have white space surrounding them.
  • If I am honest, the technology is cool and useful for educational use, but I not sure where it all can go.   The question is what can others come up with to use it, I would love to hear about it.



Related Links



 All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Robot Software

In the previous blog posts for this 'series' "It is a good time...."  Post 1  looked at the hardware unpinning some of this positive rise in robots; Post 2  looked at social robots; Post 3  looked at a collection of small robots; Post 4 looked at further examples of small robots Robots, such as the forthcoming Buddy and JIBO, will be based some established open sourceand other technologies. Jibo will be based around various technologies including Electron and JavaScript (for more details see:  http://blog.jibo.com/2015/07/29/jibo-making-development-readily-accessible-to-all-developers/ ). Buddy is expected to be developed around tools for Unity3d, Arduino and OpenCV, and support Python, C++, C#, Java and JavaScript (for more details see http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/customize_your_buddy_companion_robot_with_this_software_development_kit ).  This post contin ues with some of the software being used with the smaller robots.  A number ...
1 comment
Read more

Speech Recognition in Scratch 3 - turning Hello into Bonjour!

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a programming activity Alien Language , with support Dale from Machine Learning for Kids , that is a brilliant use of Scratch 3 - Speech Recognition to control a sprite in an alien language. Do the activity, and it is very much worth doing, and it will make sense! I  would also recommend going to the  machinelearningforkids.co.uk   site anyway it is full of exciting things to do (for example loads of activities  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/#!/worksheets  ) . Scratch 3 has lots of extensions that are accessible through the Extension button in the Scratch 3 editor (see below) which add new fun new blocks to play with. The critical thing for this post is  Machine Learning for Kids  have created a Scratch 3 template with their own extensions for Scratch 3 within it  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/scratch3/ . One of which is a Speech to Text extension (see below). You must use this one ...
5 comments
Read more

Scratch and web-cams in Scratch 3

Scratch 3 was launched on 2nd January 2019, so I wanted to know would Webcams still work with Scratch 3 as it did with Scratch 2. For example, in a previous post  Scratch, webcams, cats and explosions  the cat (Scratch) moved across the screen and a button burst when the object moved in the camera onto it.  Can the same thing be done in Scratch 3? The short answer is yes, but it is done slightly differently. The first change the video capture is not there in the blocks automatically; but is an extension that needs to be added. First, you need to add the extension blocks for video sensing. Go to the little icon at the bottom left of the screen (as shown below) this takes you to the extensions menu. Next, find the Video Sensing option and selected. The webcam, if enabled, with start automatically. A video sensing set of blocks is now in the list of block options.  The rest is very similar to doing this in Scratch 2. Moving ...
3 comments
Read more