You’ve seen the demos. You like the idea of tracking tags in the real world to create visuals. And now you want to try augmented reality for yourself - and, incidentally, you’re a Flash developer.

Reader Eric Socolofsky writes to share a framework he’s created that makes it much easier to work with the Flash-based, open source FLARToolkit, called FLARManager. Version 0.4 is just released:

http://words.transmote.com/wp/20090618/flarmanager-v04/

FLARManager has a number of features that improve upon the existing work done by FLARToolkit:

• Building the apps themselves is easier. Fire up the framework with Flex Builder (or Flash, or Eclipse, or FlashDevelop), and you have access to all the libraries you need, so you can start playing more or less out of the box. Hello, world, indeed.
• You don’t have to rely on Papervision if you don’t want to. Papervision, the faux-3D library for Flash, is included with the distribution. But marker tracking is decoupled from Papervision, so you don’t have to use it if you don’t need it.
• Better event management. Marker adding, updating, and removal, multiple pattern detection and management, and the like are all extended in FLARManager.
• Great documentation. Eric has taken the time to read some fantastic getting started tutorials, all accessible from the site above so you can go play.

Now, you wouldn’t pick Flash for speed - that’s not the idea.

Via Aaron Meyers, who’s getting ready for some fun projects at Eyebeam here in New York this week, anyone using a camera for capture, live video, or tracking needs to check out this copious thread on the OpenFrameworks forum:

beginners ~ Sony PS3 Eye

We already knew Sony’s US$40 PS3 Eye camera was a wonder; that’s why we strongly recommended its use in the tangible interface hackday hosted earlier this month. But while we’ve heard some good luck squeezing performance out of the thing on Windows and Linux, the Mac - while reliable - could use more options and performance. Theo Watson, one of the OpenFrameworks team, comes to the rescue with a patched version of the macam open source video driver - halfway down the page. (I hope his changes get rolled into macam?)

You’ll find lots of other tips, not only for the Mac but other stuff, as well.

We’ll keep collecting tips on this camera. Macam experiences, anyone? I’m still trying to successfully build the Linux driver; once I sort that out, I’ll share.

2009 will be remembered as the E3 game event that embraced computer vision. Far from me-too answers to the Wii’s gestural controllers, we saw remarkably different visions of how computer tracking might work.

As expected, Sony had their own motion tracking system to unveil at their press conference. But unlike Microsoft’s 3D camera, Sony opted to build on their already-lovable PlayStation 3 Eye camera with wands with spheres. The controllers look ridiculous, and lack the magic of the Microsoft demos. But don’t dismiss them out of hand. (Sorry, there’s no way to write this story without lots of abstract puns.)

Much of what Microsoft showed was “conceptual” video – and some of the hands-on demonstrations had noticeable latency problems. Sony’s approach, meanwhile, was really quite literal in its demonstation. The tracking looks extremely accurate in 3D space, and latency appears to be minimal.

Above: Video of the press conference – check out how quick and accurate the tracking looks

Via Joystiq; see also Offworld’s excellent 5 Things You Need to Know about the Sony shindig

The other good news for people working as artists and not necessarily mass-market game developers is that you can start to play with these ideas right now. Whereas Microsoft seems to have “lost” the once publicly-available 3D camera SDK for their solution, Sony is using an off-the-shelf camera you can buy right now and doing the rest of the work in software. I really like the use of tangible interfaces with cameras, because you can get more predictable tracking results, and you get the tactile feedback of having something in your hands. (I’m not sure I’d be as excited as they are about having a glowing ball on the end, but maybe I need to channel my inner raver.)

Anyway, here’s my humble prediction: it doesn’t matter how cool the demo looks or what sweeping statements anyone makes. Gameplay alone matters, and that means that what has to happen next is dependent entirely on the tracking working reliably and quickly, and developers building smart stuff around it that works as games. The same, naturally, is true for anyone doing broader interaction design and live visuals.

Sony is also getting further into the augmented reality arena. They have a Tamigotchi/Nintendogs-style augmented reality pet simulator, EyePet, for the console (see Joystiq’s hands-on), plus Invizimals, an augmented reality title for the PS3. Of the two, Invizimals is the most interesting. It’s funny that they immediately design it for kids (too bad, as I can see some office antics with this sort of thing). It’s also evident just how hard designing an effective augmented reality game can be. I don’t think skepticism would be wildly out of place – it’s clear that there’s something powerful about the concept, but not clear just what it will be.

And I don’t need to remind you, if you haven’t joined our tangible interface virtual party Saturday, head to http://hackday.noisepages.com/ – ARToolkit augmented reality is very much on the plate of stuff we’d like to see people play with. (The other schemes we’re using, Trackmate and reacTIVision, are better suited to 2D tracking on a surface, though they’re very, very reliable for that task.)

Believe it or not, people making art with webcams don’t rate very highly on the priority list for big computer companies. (Who would have thought?) On the PC, at least, there’s a thriving market for webcams for video chat, since so few PCs have built-in cameras. Meanwhile, on the Mac, Apple has absolutely zero interest in you using any webcams other than those built into their machines, or, if you’re lucky, one of the FireWire iSights Apple made before Apple discontinued them. (Given the high failure rate I’ve seen on the iSights, that assumes you’re lucky enough not only to have found one, but to have it still working.) Ditto, naturally, third-party manufacturers, since there’s unlikely to be any significant market for their wares — and they’re busy navigating the morass of driver development complexity on PCs.

Long story short: the Creative Labs Live! Optia I raved about in the fall is one of the few choices you’ve got that doesn’t require drivers. It’s USB video class-compliant, though unlike other USB classes, it’s not entirely clear that that’s all that meaningful.

But, for several glorious months, through last week, I was able to keep my Live Optia working perfectly with Processing (and thus QuickTime for Java) and QuickTime (via tools like Jitter). Until today, that is. Now I’ve got two of them, five Macs to test, and — nada. On 10.4.10 / QT 7.2 and 10.4.8 / QT 7.1.3 and 7.2, I get either a black screen or (in QuickTime video capture) garbled video. It looks like the sequence grabber isn’t properly setting the resolution, so pixels are being dumped arbitrarily from the camera … I suspect the other errors I’m seeing are also related. USB video class support is relatively new; it only hit iChat in 10.4.9 and may have reached the OS at the same time — I would know for sure, except documentation from Apple is scant.

I suspect some misbehaved QuickTime update, though I find it especially odd that it fails on multiple machines (all Intel — iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini) with different versions. I’ve tried reinstalling QT, zapping NVRAM (formerly PRAM), the lot. For once, I can’t blame QuickTime for Java, because everything else is broken, too.

Webcams working some of the time under unpredictable circumstances don’t inspire confidence. Suggestions, anyone? Any idea why this is happening? Anyone got a rock-solid solution for Mac webcams that doesn’t spontaneously cease functioning?

Incidentally, Windows isn’t much better; weird driver bugs there can cause fabulous results like an echo-cancellation driver knocking out USB MIDI devices, driver-related blue screens of death, and other goodies.

Maybe I should just start making my own cameras and writing my own drivers. Yeah, that’s it.