Last year, the ARToolkit, a fundamental building block for creating augmented reality applications, was ported to Flash in the form of the FLARToolkit. This was a watershed moment for AR, as it became exponentially easier for Flash developers to create their own augmented reality experiences. Before then, AR had been a high-tech concept that experienced developers and companies had been experimenting with; by becoming more accessible to Flash developers, AR took off in popularity last year.
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Now, in 2010, the ARToolkit has once again been ported, this time to Microsoft's Silverlight platform. German .Net developer Rene Schulte recently released the SLARToolkit which will allow augmented reality applications to run in Silverlight.
"SLARToolkit is a flexible Augmented Reality library for Silverlight with the aim to make real time Augmented Reality applications with Silverlight as easy and fast as possible," says Schulte. "It can be used with Silverlight's Webcam API or with any other CaptureSource or a WriteableBitmap."
The SLARToolkit supports detection of multiple markers, both from simple black and white, and custom markers, and is based on the Matrix3DEx Silverlight library. The port to Silverlight is another important step for augmented reality, and could lead to the further expansion of AR both on the desktop and on mobile devices running Windows Mobile.
Earlier this month we saw Adobe Flash and AIR gain support on the Android Mobile OS, and Flash on the iPhone has been a recurring rumor since the device was first released. AR may not be the biggest mobile market, or a killer feature for mobile phones, but with the expansion of the ARToolkit to Silverlight, and the Flash support on Android, it has taken a big step toward wider exposure to more users.
SLARToolkit - Silverlight Augmented Reality 3D projection sample from Rene Schulte on Vimeo.
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