arStudio a new open source tool for augmented reality creatives

Developing an augmented reality application can be a difficult task. There are several obligatory stages to follow and the job can be very complicated. Especially if you are not an expert developer but a “creative” or a visual artist with programming experience. To help and simplify this process, we started to develop an editor to create small augmented reality web applications. The editor is called arStudio and is based on webglstudio.org: the software is written entirely in javascript, and allows the creation of interactive applications in a 3D environment. The project was started by Thorsten Bux and I am part of the development team.

Features of webglstudio.

Webglstudio is not a program for creating 3d objects like Blender, 3dSmax or Maya, it is rather an editor for transforming 3d scenes into interactive web applications. It consists of several windows and functions, it is together a scene editor, an editor for scripting code (Js and GLSL) and an editor for “graphs” as many other software are provided. But the most important thing is that when you decide that your project is finished, you can publish it directly as html and javascript code, just with a click of a mouse. The properties of this editor, however, are not limited to what I have listed but go far beyond expectations. I recommend you visit the demo page to get an idea.

ArStudio and augmented reality.

What will arStudio do? It will be possible with very little effort to develop an interactive web application for augmented reality. Without even writing a line of code! At the moment it is possible to add in the scene:

• Pattern markers (Hiro and Kanj)
• Barcode markers
• NFT markers (Pinball image only)

There is still a lot to do but the future for this project is promising, it is not free from bugs and other problems at the moment, but we are very confident and convinced that we will be able to improve it more and more. If you want to test the editor, go to the github page of arStudio, you can download the zip file or clone the project with git by running this command in a terminal console:

git clone https://github.com/augmentmy-world/arStudio.git

to make the editor work it is still necessary to launch a server (python or node)

//Python 2.x
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

//Python 3.x
python -m http.server

or with node, first install the server module:

npm install http-server -g

e then:

http-server . -p 8000

This will not allow you to save and import the scenes saved on the server. To do this it is necessary to install a server that supports php like Apache and follow the procedure reported in the site. See you soon with other interesting news!