week 9 summary – paper discussion for DART [Hitesh]
Creating a compelling AR application through a programmable interface requires extensive knowledge about 3D geometry, tacking, camera and displays. This makes it difficult for designers to iteratively develop and evaluate AR solutions through prototyping, which is a very popular and effective design application process for 2D and web applications. It limits the creative process of designers.
DART (Designer’s Augmented Reality Toolkit) focuses on supporting rapid prototyping of AR experiences. It supports a collection of extensions over Macromedia Director multimedia creation tool. The idea is to support existing design practices to develop AR applications. The basic elements are the Actor behavior objects which include the objects to be placed in 3D environment, their tracking information and properties to configure their position and orientation.
The two related reference papers chosen for discussion are:
1) APRIL: A High-level Framework for Creating Augmented Reality Presentations (2005)
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1492773
An authoring platform for AR applications, focused on platform and hardware independent techniques to create and interact with AR content. It has been built on top of Studierstube. Its focus areas were spatial and temporal spaced presentation of information and features to interact with the information through simple and intuitive tools.
2) Immersive Authoring of Tangible AR (2004)
A high level toolkit that supports rapid development of AR applications without programming. The idea is to generate a system analogous to WYSIWYG content authoring tool in 2D environment. Its design space consists of physical objects, virtual objects (positioned relative to physical objects) and a logic box (that supports arithmetic operations to control behaviors of virtual objects). It also utilizes a few physical props such as Keypads and cubes which serve as interaction modes to support content creation, modification and deletion from the AR environment.
Development of such designer and easy to use AR toolkits is very effective to the creative and designing phase of AR applications but could pose some technical limitations. Following are fee questions I could think of, post reading the above papers:
1)Decision making between abstraction of underlying technical details and coupling to provide more control, for similar AR toolkits and applications?
2) Is the purpose of such toolkits only for high level prototypes and design ideas?
3) Would a tookit with multiple layers of encapsulation and complexity make sense so that it could be used by designers for basic prototypes while has the flexibility to incorporate complex technical behaviors by expert programmers?
4) Are there limitations to the application areas that could be covered with such toolkits such as Interactive story telling?
5) Would the otherwise prerequisites of a complelling AR application such as complex tracking (especially feature based), occlusion handling, and head tracking add overhead to just design and prototype oriented systems?
6) Is designing for AR systems as simple as designing for 2D applications?
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