Online .pat Generator for Markers Made by Hand

I think one of the tutors mentioned this already, but I only just found the resource: there's a Flash application online (found here) that gets your webcam input, recognises anything it thinks is contained in a marker square, and lets you pick them to export as .pat files. The resolution of the files is pretty low, though.

However, the benefit of it is that you can simply print out a few empty markers, then scribble in them and then use this application to generate the .pat files for you.

I was using this for a while during the day, but then when the sun set and I had to use artificial lighting rather than daylight, I noticed the markers stopped being picked up because the .pat files weren't accurate to them. Rather than lowering the confidence of the marker detection needed to detect a marker (it was already at 50%), I decided to try something a little tricky. BuildAR can generate .patt files from .bmps and .gifs. I took a guess and hoped that BuildAR was developed from the same base as FLARToolkit and used BuildAR to create a marker, then used that in FLARToolkit. Lucky for me, it worked! Now I've got much higher-detail .pat files to work with.

I should also mention here that I had a lot of trouble getting FLARToolkit up and running. This wasn't due to FLARToolkit, but was actually due to the fact I was using Adobe Flash CS3 to try compile the example files. After downloading Flash Builder, FLEX 1.4, and Flash Develop to try get things working in CS3, I finally gave in and downloaded a trial of Adobe Flash CS5, which now works with no issues whatsoever, and I was luckily able to install it without uninstalling any of CS3. I'm fairly sure that only CS5 can compile them properly, though I wouldn't be surprised if there's a chance that CS4 could handle them, too.

Thanks to a lot of help from Josh and Jackie, I've gotten my head around how the Flash IDE works. Tasks currently still ahead of me are:

- get a 3D model other than a generic cube showing up (I thought I was having trouble with it, but now I'm supposing it's due to lighting issues)
- get an animated 3D model showing up and animating
- get a model on marker A changing state (eg, what model is being displayed) when I cover / uncover marker B, thus turning markers into real-world buttons