More Than Technical

Archive for June, 2009

Hi

I have been playing around with NyARToolkit's CPP implementation in the last week, and I got some nice results. I tried to keep it as "casual" as I could and not get into the crevices of every library, instead, I wanted to get results and fast.

First, NyARToolkit is a derivative of the wonderful ARToolkit by the talented people @ HIT Lab NZ & HIT Lab Uni of Washington. NyARToolkit however was ported to many other different platforms, like Java, C# and even Flash (Papervision3D?), and in the process making it object oriented, instead of ARToolkit procedural approach. NyARToolkit have made a great job, so I decided to build from there.

NyART don't provide any video capturing, and no 3D rendering in their CPP implementation (they do in the other ports), so I set out to build it on my own. OpenCV is like a second language to me, so I decided to take its video grabbing mechanism wrapper for Win32. For 3D rendering I used the straightforward GLUT library which does an excellent job ridding the programmer from all the Win#@$#@ API mumbo-jumbo-CreateWindowEx crap.

So let's dive in....
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Last week I got a hold of the HTC G1 Android Developer Phone. This (how else) was preceded by a big fight with my cellular operator who insisted that I will take a data plan.

Ok, I said to myself, I bought this phone so that obviously mean I will use cellular internet. "So how much is that data plan?" I asked the representative.

"It's 1000K" she replied. "1MB?" I asked in wonder. "No, not 1MB – 1000 KB!"

That's when I understood she has no clue what she's talking about. Furthermore, this "joke-data plan" was limited to WAP browsing. Oh come on!!!!

And I can't replace it for a real data plan; I have to add money on top of it!

Well, I do not want to bore you with this specific war, because this is only a prolog for this post, but let's just say it pays off to be stubborn. I ended up with no obligation to any data plan (which of course I took one, but now I can cancel it any time).

Now that I've got THAT over with, I got around to checking out this wonderful phone (and forgive me iPhone fans – I'm not saying this is BETTER than iPhone, only that it's DIFFERENT).

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