Custom Marker Experiments

Thought I'd share a few experiments I've been doing with custom marker designs for FLARToolkit. Recently I designed three marker designs, with various levels of complexity:

Rocket Marker (very simple design)

NSC Logo Marker (more complex design)

Moon Marker (less complex, but with variations in tone)

The marker designs were made in Photoshop, and turned into PAT files for actionscript linkage using the Online Marker Generator on the Taro Taro Flash Blog:

flash.tarotaro.org/blog

Check out my video below to see how I fared with the testing of my three custom markers with my earlier Planet Test prototype:

As you can see, mixed results! While the Rocket marker works well, I think with the NSC Logo marker the problem is that it is within another black square, and so the program can't figure out which way is up/down/left/right very easily - the actual design within the square probably just bleeds into a symmetrical lump of white anyway, it is too complex. As for the Moon marker, my guess is that the problem here is because of the shading of the moon craters - I suspect that the markers only work properly with solid blocks of colour.

So plenty for me to work on - I still want to create my own custom designs, and although I think that AR in Flash can probably only handle solid blocks of colour, what's to say those colours have to be black and white... watch this space (no pun intended)!