Mrinal Wadhwa » 3D

Augmenting reality using Flash

Mrinal Wadhwa — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:09:08 +0000

I gave a talk about Augmenting Reality at Devcamp Bangalore this Saturday. In the talk I did some live coding to show how you can use Saqoosha’s FLARToolkit AS3 library to add 3D objects to a webcam video in real-time … here’s a video recording of the application we created during the session … it adds a cow to reality ..

The core idea behind FLARToolkit (which is an AS3 port of ARToolkit) as I understand it … is that it can detect if a given pattern is present in a bitmap, if so .. then where is it located and how much has it been transformed in 3D space. Once we have this information .. we can manipulate the bitmap (or a frame of video from a webcam in our case) to add virtual objects that can be moved and transformed same as the pattern. If this is done over each frame of the movie coming from the webcam it creates the illusion of a real object being added to the video and the object moves around as we move the pattern in reality.

Here’s the code with detailed comments on how this is achieved … You can download the complete project here.

Try it out yourself …

Print out this marker pattern [pdf]
You’ll need a webcam
Visit this application
Allow it to use your webcam
Move the pattern in front of the webcam
You should see a virtual cow moving with it.

References

Here are the various places where I got a lot of this information from ..

Saqoosha’s getting started article
Mikko Haapoja’s post on Getting Started with FLARToolkit
Lee Brimelow’s video tutorial at gotondlearn
FLARToolkit source and examples

I hope everyone who came to my talk enjoyed it .. I would love to hear any feedback that you may have.

Also a very special thankyou to the all the guys who were behind organizing Devcamp, I had a great time and learned a lot.

Awesome 3D Text with VectorVision

Mrinal Wadhwa — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 02:24:56 +0000

I love 3D in Flash, but till now I’d never been very happy with the quality of text rendering in my Papervision3D projects. Papervision is a bitmap based 3D engine and because of that not very good at rendering text.

Yesterday, I found VectorVision, which is an extension of Paperviosn3D that enables rendering vectors inside of Papervision3D. The authors Mark Barcinski & Adrien Jeanjean, have ported some of the work Mathieu Badimon did for his vector based 3D engine, Five3D, to enable vector fonts inside of Papervision. And to top that they added support for rendering any SVG in Papervision .. super cool !!

Here’s a quick example I cooked up, notice the crisp font ..

View Example

View Source of Example

Check out VectorVision

3D Earth with Papervision 3D

Mrinal Wadhwa — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 03:20:27 +0000

Inspired by Yahoo’s NewsGlobe I decided to create my own 3d earth .. I used Papervision3d and NASA’s Blue Marble images to build it.

Right now it doesn’t do much, just rotates, but I plan on adding some more functionality later.

Check out my 3D Earth

DevCamp: my lightning talk on Papervision3D

Mrinal Wadhwa — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 10:34:37 +0000

I was at DevCamp yesterday and it was awesome, I learned a little bit about a lot of interesting topics Semantic Web, microformats, wordpress plugin development, Mozilla XULRunner, Mozilla Prism, GP2X, PIPS etc.. Abdul’s presentation on AIR was very nice as well.

I presented a lightning talk titled “3D on the web with Papervision3D” … I had 3 minutes and my plan was to convey one message … 3D on the web is totally practical now (performs well, easy to build) and you should start thinking about how you can use it … I hope I got my message across .. I couldn’t show all the examples I wanted to, so here they are …

Carlos’s awesome car header
Smallworlds, secondlife like worlds on the web by Outsmart.
Audi’s rhythm of lines
Earthmine, photo-realistic 3D environments to accurately document our world.
Mr.Doob’s cool experiments
Carlos’ spaceship experiment
Lincoln MKS website
Nike’s ACG website
Sony’s Bravia website

You can get Papervision3D from google code or get more information about it at their blog or at the mailing list.

I believe that 3D is going to be an integral part of software user interfaces in the near future … Apple’s coverflow and Google Earth’s interface are good examples of how its already started to happen.

My 10 favourite Flex RIAs of 2007

Mrinal Wadhwa — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 17:48:56 +0000

Hundreds of Flex based Rich Internet Applications came to life in 2007 … here are 10 applications that I liked most, these are the ones that made me wish I was involved in building them … I’m sure there were apps that made you wish the same, so do share your own list … here’s mine ..

initRIA: 15 more seats added on public demand

Mrinal Wadhwa — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 18:14:09 +0000

As this is our first time organizing a conference, we are trying to keep the scale of the event in control and hence we had originally planned to have only 100 attendees. We ran out of these seats very quickly … and since then there have been many people who have approached us wishing they could register… so we have now decided to add 15 more seats … if you haven’t registered already, go do it now before the seats run out again.

Note: If you had earlier registered and now cannot attend due to some unforeseen reason, please un-register so that someone else could attend in your place.

See you Sunday.

initRIA: seats exhausted in less than 3 days

Mrinal Wadhwa — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:26:20 +0000

The preparations for initRIA have been going great, we exhausted our 100 seats in less that three days of opening registrations … actually due to a technical glitch on the website we overshot the limit by 7 seats .. so we now have 107 registrations (don’t worry we can handle that) ….. thank you every one who helped spreading the word.

I’m now getting the topic proposals sorted out and planning the schedule out. I’ll keep everyone posted.

Exploring the 3rd Dimension with Papervision3D

Mrinal Wadhwa — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 20:29:51 +0000

I’ve been playing with Papervision3D in my spare time these past few days and its been a lot of fun… I’ve been going through the documentation and some of the tutorials on the wiki and I have started to build an app that will help me learn.

My intention is to see how can I create some extraordinary user experiences with Papervision3d, Flex and AIR. The new set of Interactive classes introduced in Papervision present some very interesting opportunities to that respect. The first 3D application that I am going to build is a 3D Art Gallery, this will be like a room that you can walk through to see Art on the walls. The panorama example that comes with Papervision helped me create a Room which you can see here. This is an empty room that will make my Art Gallery, move around your mouse to take a look around the room, you can view the source by right clicking on the app. I have modified the panorama example to make it a UIComponent as my main intention is to operate within the Flex Framework. This is a very un-refined example and I will refine it as I go along building the app.

I have also downloaded Blender and at first look it was quite intimidating, but after I went through the video tutorials on their site things have started to make some sense, although its obvious that this tool will take quite some amount of time for me to learn still is seems to have awesome possibilities.

Venturing into the 3rd dimension : 3D Art Gallery