Together we’ve been working on our augmented reality project and have already made great steps towards our end goal of a cheap, effective, and fun augmented reality environment. Because the basis of the competition and the height of pocket computing is the Raspberry Pi we will be building our project around a Raspberry Pi 3.
One of the first limitations is running augmented reality software on a Pi with minimal latency and a high frame-rate. The first idea was to build the programs in Unity and export these to the Pi. Unfortunately, the Unity engine does not natively support that ARM processor and would require us to install android on the Pi, all of this would greatly slow down the environment and our workflow. Since we have a limited timeframe and hardware we looked for another approach.
This is how we came across OpenSpace3D (find at: http://www.openspace3d.com), an open source augmented reality program that perfectly suited our needs and supports the Raspberry Pi out of the box.
Our initial progress with this platform has been fantastic, and Peter has put together a demo of the capabilities of the software, which we will be building upon for the final project. We are using a marker based AR system in which the projected reality is based on the position and orientation of a “marker”, some image that can be recognised and anchor the scene to. There are other options for AR but we felt this gave the best experience overall with the time and resources that we have available.
The headset we will be building will be a full face shield, similar to many VR headsets, with a camera mounted in front of the active eyepiece. We’ve opted for a monocular design with the second eye simply covered. This is another time and cost saving measure allowing us to focus on building the platform, and with the understanding that AR can support monocular vision with far less issues than a comparable VR would. We discussed the housing of the computer and we felt it made most sense to store the raspberry pi on the rear of the device, around the back of the user’s head to minimise bulk on the front of the device.
More updates are to come as we build hardware, our current tasks are to create a minimal working prototype of the headset and work on creating more interactive programs to use in the AR environment.
Hack_AR 