Vuforia vs Metaio vs Layar - vuforia

I am new to markerless AR. I have done one Marker based AR application. As I want to develop applications based on Markerless AR and considering the fact that I am new to markerless AR, I want to know the advantages and disadvantages for the following SDKs: Vuforia, Metaio, and Layar to start developing markerless AR applications.

Both Vuforia and Metaio provide resources for developers.
Both platforms are pretty equal in 2D image tracking with Unity.
The difference comes with 3D tracking. Metaio seems to be the leader in this now with their various types- Edge based, point cloud, etc.
I'd say stick to Vuforia unless you absolutely need the 3D tracking.
the text above is answers of people in unity forums
for more detail -> http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/vuforia-vs-metaio.230838/

Related

What is the purpose of /drawable-v14 or /drawable-v11?

I've seen that some Google's or other open source projects have resource directories like /drawable-v14 or /drawable-hdpi-v11.
Now, I understand what this means: all devices with SDK larger or equal than v11/v14 should use these images.
But what is the purpose of this? Why and when should I use them? Why devices of HDPI resolution and SDK v11 should ever use images different than HDPI devices and SDK 10?
I just cannot see when I will ever use one image for SDK 10 and another for SDK 17, for example. Makes no sense to me.
As a side note, the usage of resources /values-v{11/14/17} is logical and has the practical benefit.
This can be use in order to style your icons to the current UI guidelines on the given Android version.
Android has had a lot of evolution on its GUI style from its beginning. In Cupcake, icons had to show a 3D effect with a shadow. With ICS, there is more flat icons. And it will keep on changing with android 5 and more... (Let's watch the Google i/o 2014 to know more about it! ... by the way: its today!)
So basically you can stick to the GUI guidelines even from different Android versions. It's probably not the only use case but it is one of them.

Tracking the top of heads with Kinect

I was wondering if there was an existing API for tracking the top of people heads with the Kinect. e.g., the Kinect is facing downwards from a ceiling.
If not, how might I implement such a thing with its depth data.
No. The Kinect expects to be facing a standing (or seated, given the appropriate flag) human. All APIs (official or 3rd party) that have a notion of skeleton tracking expect this.
If you wish you track someone from above, you will need to use a library such as OpenCV (or EmguCV, for C# development). Well, you don't have to, but they offer utilities to help with computer vision and image processing. These libraries don't care if you are using a Kinect or just a regular RGB camera.
Using the Kinect from above, you could use the depth data to help locate and track blobs. With the Kinect at a known distance from the floor, have a few people walk under it and see what z-coordinates you get out of it -- you can then assume that anything within a certain z-coordinate range is a person walking across the screen (vs. a cat, or something else).
You will need to use standard image processing techniques (see OpenCV reference above) to initially find the blobs within the image. Once found, the depth data from the Kinect might be useful but I think you'll find it isn't ultimately necessary if you're just watching people walk across the floor.
We built a Kinect-driven experience where the sensors had to point downward to detect users walking along a wall. We used openTSPS to do all the work of taking the camera input and doing blob detection and handing off tracked "persons" to (in our case) a Processing app. It works really well for us.
http://opentsps.com/

How to do image processing with iPhoneSDK

How does one do image processing & manipulation in an iPhone application?
I would like to include below 3 important steps:
access raw RGB from image data
apply any image processing (edge detect, grey-scale, contrast & color).
create a new image from this modified data.
I got few links with color & contrast, but still looking for edge detection just from the corners of the image.
Here are the links:
https://launchpad.net/imagemagick/main/6.3.2-2
http://code.google.com/p/image-tools2009/source/checkout
http://www.google.com/codesearch#I0cABDTB4TA/pub/FreeBSD/
Is there any other open source code available for these functionalities?
Your question highlights open source frameworks - but I'm going to throw my answer behind Apple's CoreImage framework that is now available in iOS5. CI has been around as an OSX framework for a very long time and as of iOS 5+ you can use a subset of the filters in iOS.
Advantages include:
Very powerful
Highly Optimised
Been around for ages
Ray Wenderlich has great tutorials and he has one on "Beginning Core Image in OS5" which I think might be right up your alley. He talks of the fundamental parts like CIContext, CIImage, CIFilter.
The second place you should look is the Core Image Programming guide for iOS and then CoreImage Filter Reference from Apple. The filter reference mentions which filters are available in iOS.
If you're finding that all a bit difficult, I think you may need to step backwards into CoreGraphics to learn the underlying basics of graphics on iOS - but that's outside the scope of this question.

VB6 Game Development

I am developing a game in VB6 (plz don't ask me why :) ).
The storyboard is ready and a rough implementation is underway.
I am following a "pure-software-rendering" approach. (i.e. no DirectX, no openGL etc.)
Amongst many others, the following "serious" problems exist:
2D alpha transparency reqd. to implement overlays.
Parallax implementation to give depth-of-field illusion.
Capturing mouse-scroll events globally (as in FPS-es; mapping them to changing weapon).
Async sound play with absolute "near-zero-lag".
Any ideas anyone. Please suggest any well documented library/ocx or sample-code.
Plz do suggest solutions with good performance and as little overhead as possible.
Also, anyone who has developed any games,
and would be open to sharing her/his code would be highly appreciated.
(any well-acknowledged VB games whose source-code i can study??)
UPDATE: Here is a screen shot of GearHead Garage.
This picture ought to describe what i was attempting in words above... :)
(source: softwarepod.com)
EGL25 by Erkan Sanli is a fast open source VB 6 renderer that can render, rotate, animate, etc. complex solid shapes made of thousands of polygons. Just Windows API calls – no DirectX, no OpenGL.
(source: vbmigration.com)
VBMigration.com chose EGL25 as a high-quality open-source VB6 project (to demonstrate their VB6 to VB.Net upgrade tool).
Despite that, and despite my opinion that VB6 is often criticised too harshly, I can't help thinking there must be better options for game development in 2010?
You may want to check out the Game Programming Wiki -- it used to be "Lucky's VB Game Site" (and we're talking a LONG time ago) but all of the content (VB5/6 centric) moved to the Wiki with the addition of other languages.
It appears that much of the legacy VB6 content is still available on the site.
Have a look at DxIce : http://gamedev.digiapp.com/
I think you will find no well-acknowledged written games in VB6 for precisely the reasons you state above.
It was not designed to be a high performance language. For that you NEED to use the graphics libraries (DirectX, OpenGL) you said you didn't want to use unless you want to BitBLT everything yourself using API calls which is probably not going to get what you need.
VB6 is interpreted, outdated, and I'd be surprised if it runs on Windows 7.
I think you need to seriously re-evaluate the methodology here.
For audio playback, I have used http://www.fmod.org/ in the past. This, and other libraries like BASS, are only free for non-commercial use. I also suggest avoiding the built-in multimedia playback object.

What would you recommend to do simple 2D Graphics?

I want to build a program that will (as part of what it's doing) display lines organically growing and interacting horizontally across the screen. Here's a sample image, just imagine the lines sprouting from the left and growing to the right:
The lines would look like the lines used on Google Maps Transit Overlay or OnNYTurf's transit pages.
It's a personal project, so I'm open to just about any language and library combination. But I don't know where to start. What have you used in the past to create graphics that are similar to this? What would you recommend? I want it to run on Windows without any extras needed (.Net is fine), and it doesn't have to run elsewhere. I needs to run as an actual program, not javascript in the browser.
There's obviously no 'right' answer to this, but the purpose isn't to start an argument about X better than Y but rather just find a list of graphics toolkits that do simple 2D graphics that people recommend because of their ease of use or community or whatever.
Processing may be just the tool for you.
Like you said, there are many ways to tackle this problem. Me personally, being it is a windows based project, I would go with the .NET based implementation utilizing WPF. There are tutorials on how to use the 2D drawing feature out there ( http://www.wpftutorial.net/DrawOnPhysicalDevicePixels.html for one ) Again, there is no right answer here. I might also pick some new technology and let your project be a mechanism to learn something new, providing you do not have a looming deadline.

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