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It is also important to define the purpose of the application, the AR scenario, the
design of the augmentations, which is also a highly creative stage.
Other authors stress the importance of prototyping the AR application (Mullen
2011
) as a method of elaboration of an AR application, i.e., the design and
implementation of the general application structure, as a different stage from the
one of authoring and adding the augmentations.
There are two possible approaches for the development of an AR application: (a)
use of rapid development or authoring tools, which does not require programming
skills, the development effort being focused on the creative part of authoring the
augmentations and loading them on CMS platforms; (b) use of programming and
of SDKs (Software Development Kits) which allows the integration of the AR
functions in a general purpose application, a method for creating complex and highly
customized applications. In our case we opted for the former approach because
it allows for the creation of device-independent applications, i.e. compatible with
different mobile OS (iOS, Android or Blackberry), while the latter would have
restricted us to device dependent applications.
Because the current AR platforms allow the combination of geo-based appli-
cations with image-recognition ones, we opted for both tracking technologies to
implement our concept of fractal-like evocation of the Past.
Initially we implemented a demo AR application to test the technology for
which chose the Layar platform with Wordpress as the CMS and Google's Feed-
George plugin for the management of the geographic locations (POIs) and the
augmentations. With Layar we created the
ARt-chaeology
layer. In the second
stage we chose the Junaio AR browser from Metaio because we needed certain
advanced capabilities: 3D tracking, video textures, interactive augmentations, and
an immersive experience based on the Unity3D gaming engine. On this platform we
created two channels, a geo-based one and an image-recognition one, which were
linked to create a unified experience.
The application authoring involved the following steps:
Definition of the POIs and geo-referencing of the archaeological area;
Creation of the explanatory texts for the applications and the POIs;
Authoring of the application logo;
Development of icons for the visual customization of the POIs on the map;
Authoring of the augmentation: texts, movies, 3D models, optimized for render-
ization on mobile phones and mobile internet communications, i.e. to reduce time
and costs;
Definition and implementation of the gallery of reference images (the 2D-
trackables);
Creation of the 3D cloud point model of the prehistoric house (the 3D-trackable);
Loading of the content in the CMS platform;
Testing and adjustment of the display size of the images taking into account the
distance to, and the dimension of, the real images.
