Augmented Reality for Web Developers
Whatever happened to Augmented Reality? There’s been a lot of hype, but has it resulted in anything useful yet? According to the Gartner Hype Cycle, expectations for AR have already peaked and it’s about to move into the Trough of Disillusionment.
However, I’m still excited about AR. In fact, I’m more excited about it now than ever before. Why?
We’re getting close to consumer-ready wearable AR devices, such as Google's Project Glass. In a recent interview on the Gavin Newsom Show, Sergey Brin said he’s hopeful they could actually come to market next year. I think that these kind of devices could open up a whole new age for AR.
I believe in the power of the Web. Up until now, AR has only been possible through native apps (or Flash). But now it’s opening up to Web developers and it’s possible to build AR apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk on this subject at the London Web meetup group. It covers Wikitude’s ARchitect platform (a bit like PhoneGap for AR) and WebRTC (an emerging standard for working with real-time communications through the Web).
A couple of people have asked if I’d share my slides. They’re web slides, based on the HTML5 Rocks slide deck. But I changed the design, added media queries and embedded a live WebRTC demo inside. If you haven’t seen an augmented reality dinosaur in your browser before, I encourage you to try it out!
Some quick points to note first:
- Best in Chrome or Safari. To see the AR dinosaur demo, you’ll need Chrome Dev or Chrome Canary (see: http://www.webrtc.org/running-the-demos)
- Best viewed in a 4:3 ratio (the ideal is full-screen at 1024x768 - the resolution of the projector)
- It contains lots of big images so make sure you’re on a broadband connection
- Press the keyboard left + right arrow keys to navigate (or swipe left/right on an iPhone or iPad)
Here’s the link:
http://augmented-reality-for-web-devs.herokuapp.com
And I’ve shared the code on GitHub: https://github.com/poshaughnessy/augmented-reality-for-web-devs
There’s not too much text in the slides so if you would like a bit more context, the talk was also video recorded and the video is up - thanks to Nathan - at: