Augmented reality is slowly becoming perhaps somewhat of a bevel effect/lensflare among the technology enthusiasts, but actually it’s only beginning to creep into consciousness of the “marketing people” (as I call them) so I though it’s high time I joined the ranks and pop my AR cherry. : - )

This demo is based on excellent ar tutorial by Lee Brimelow, you should definitely check it out if you want to play with AR.

One thing I discovered, the marker pickup up by FLARE toolkit can be quite tricky at times and it really helps if you do apply a threshold filter to an input bitmap data.

I added basic flying controls to helicopter and a helipad plane to ground it on the surface..

Demo was build with Adobe Flash Builder demo, but the most important class extends UIComponent, so should be easily transferable to Flex 3.

You can view the demo here and right click to view the source.

If you don’t have a web cam watch screencast here.

It all started when I decided to try out the new Flex 4 Beta. The aim was to build Collada viewer that loads the dae files from the users’ filesystem / harddrive using new flash 10 FileRef API. What seemed like a pretty straightforward task turned into a Nightmare Lite after I realised I can’t just grab a new BasicView and dump it into a new sparks group container! The problem was, the group container didn’t support rawChildren.addChild(), as it didn’t contain rawChildren property.

After spending couple of hours trying and failing I came upon a working solution :

Use UIComponent as a wrapper for a BaseView which is implemented via composition. UIComponent is compatible with Sparks containers and can be added via addElement(); Thankfully UIComponents allows adding BaseView via addChild.. If you need to access a camera, scene, light etc, just use public variables on your UIComponent class to expose them and link them to your baseview camera lights etc.

This simple example utilises camera and materials light color change, but you can expose and change anything you like of course..

It is implemented directly inside of mxml but of course you could still have a group with id (let’s say “scene”) and add the whole component BasicView3D programmatically.

e.g. :

scene.addElement(new BasicView3D);

Check out the sample and right click to view source script and download the entire project.