Further Progress, Now with FLARBuilder

For anyone reading who doesn't know, FLARManager is what's called a "wrapper" for FLARToolkit's API. That means it basically makes it nice and easy to work with FLARToolkit, giving you a bunch of pre-made things. Sort of like if you were given all the parts that can make a car work (FLARToolkit), and then someone decided to put most of it together for you (FLARManager) so you can focus on learning to drive and pimping it out with extra stuff.

I was told a lot of useful stuff about FLARManager by Jacky Yuen, so it's given me a good footstool of knowledge to work with. I started not able to get even the basic FLARManager stuff compiling due to Flash player errors (I wasn't using a debugging version of it in Google Chrome). To get it working in Google Chrome, I followed the tech notes they have available here. In case that link changes, an outline of what to do is this:

To install and use an alternate version of Flash Player:

Download and install the appropriate system plug-in. This plug-in could be a debugger, pre-release, or release version of Flash Player. (Archived release versions of the system plug-in are found here.)
Type “about:plugins” (without quotation marks) into the address bar at the top of a Chrome browser window.
Click “Details” at the upper-right corner of the page.
Find the “Flash” (or “Shockwave Flash”) listing for the integrated plug-in on the page and click the corresponding “Disable” button. To identify the integrated plug-in, see the table of plug-in filenames above.
Find the “Flash” (or “Shockwave Flash”) listing for the system plug-in on the page and click the corresponding “Enable” button. To identify the system plug-in, see the table of plug-in filenames above.
Close all Chrome windows and restart the browser.

To re-enable the Flash player once you're done, you just need to go back to the "about:plugins" page, look for the Flash / Shockwave Flash plugins you disabled, then click "enable" for each of them.



After a bit of fiddling, I managed to figure out how to get some cubes showing up on various markers. Currently, I'm testing things using Flash Builder, since I finally got that working. Now the projects compile much more quickly compared to before. Flash CS5 would take the better part of a minute or two before letting me see what I'd made, whereas Flash Builder is only a few seconds, and lets you preview the Flash application in your browser.

The stage I'm currently up to is getting multiple (identical) .dae files animating over different markers. I've found the relevant OnMarkerAdded() and OnMarkerRemoved() functions, and I successfully modified two scripts to change from showing multiple cubes to showing simplified models of Team Fortress 2's Scout (which came with FLARManager).

Left to do:
- change models depending on what markers are being hidden / shown, so those markers effectively act as buttons being "clicked" by a user when they cover them up
- animate a 3D section of a building, and a few 3D plans
- see if I can detect whether or not a given animation is finished (so I can have transition animations between different states; ideally, I'd have a "neutral" state for the building model, then removing a marker would animate it back to a "neutral" state, after which it would animate to the state indicated by the removed marker)
- add cool animations to be shown over the tops of markers to act as buttons (hopefully semi-transparent textures are supported by PV3D's renderer); things like "Show Section" and "Show First Floor". I'd like to make it look like an interactive 3D menu is popping up over the marker when the user touches it, so hopefully that will be achievable within the timeframe I have left (3 days...).



The main issue left is deciding what kinds of options to provide the user when interacting with the application, taking into consideration how easy it is to model given things to avoid choking up what should be a simple, quick proof-of-concept process.