Suggestions & Improvements

[BlackWinged]

I´ll start a thread for suggestions here, so they aren´t spread about
several threads...

First one: The already-mentioned use of the camera-image to stabilize
the displayed content.
I found this vid today about a software called unifeye mobile:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5kXIizs76o&feature=player_embedded
Are they possibly using this technique already?

Their models look very well integrated into the environment.
However, the shadow from the animated dragon at 0:20 lets me speculate
that this is fake...

[twdarkflame]

The link to this group on the webpage says "Google Goup" is the
missing r intentional? :P]

That video looks like it could be real to me.
Adding a very transparent shadow under an object at a estimated ground
height shouldnt be hard.
I think they were just lucky with how well it looked on the
dragon....the shadows for the other stuff dont look anywhere near as
good.

[twdarkflame]

btw, while I havnt got a phone to handel this yet, I love the idea and
your exaction so far looks really good.
I have more faith in this application leading to DennoCoil/Halting
State/Rainbows End style futures then Layer or Wikitude like stuff
alone.

I'll be following this closely till I can try it out :)
Keep up the good work.

[garancsi]

Just started to work on my first dimension, and I have some
suggestions.

-Improove GPS accuracy. In close range features are jumping around.
Would be nice to snap GPS coordinates to a map, just like navigation
softwares do. I know it's not that easy :). Or using the average of
the last 5 gps coords, maybe with some gaussian filter not to suppress
real moving.
-Sound feature.
-onDistance event for features. Play sound, reload dimension, etc.
-Change maximum distance for radar.

[Clayton Lilly]

How's it going with your dimension?

- GPS accuracy is a tricky one, I made some early attempts with
smoothing, but they didn't work real well. It's probably worth looking
into again.
- We're still planning on adding this.
- An onDistance for features could be useful. How are you planning on
using it?
- In the newest version(1.0.8) the radar uses a log scale and ranges
from 100m to 10km, does that help?

[twdarkflame]

It depends what the time-scale of this project is, but it might not be
worth worrying about gps accuracy.
Within the next 4 years the Galileo system should be up and running,
and (especially combined with the existing gps), should give a much
higher accuracy possible natively on devices, without having to resort
to clever tricks to make things seem better.

Of course though, any solutions developed to make it seem smoother at
the current positioning resolution would probably make it seem -even
better- when the new system comes online, so it probably wouldnt be
completely wasted. So..umm..forget I said anything ;)

[garancsi]

Did a great AR demo to a customer, some road signs and fuel station
icons with distances.

I also did try smoothing on server side, but communication cannot keep
up with gps 1sec update.
Planned to do some PacMan like dimension, although jumping ghosts are
funny :) its not playable.
I could use onDistance with sound. When I reach some coordinates it
starts telling me instruction to turn right or touch the 3d features
in predefined order, like point-and-click adventure games. Not to
mention real time navigation, nice dream i know :)
Also it could be used in the near future :) to start feature
animation, so it would seem the dragon is responding to proximity.
Would lower communication frequency to update the dimension only when
needed, and not based on elapsed time or travelled distance. On
proximity you could load the high poly feature, better textures.
10 km for radar should be enough.

On Aug 19, 3:18 pm, Clayton Lilly <gamaray.i...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Clayton Lilly]

The dimensions you are working on sound really interesting, I'm
anxious to try them out.

As far as the future of events and actions in the Gamaray client, we
probably won't be doing too much more. Our main goal was to replicate
anything that the other AR Browsers could do, plus 3D and a little
client/server interaction. To accommodate every type of application we
would either need a real client side scripting system (JavaScript) or
make the whole Gamaray client available as some sort of SDK. Both are
possibilities eventually, but not right now. We will, however, be
adding an onDistance event for features that can cause the usual
actions. Also animations and sound, hopefully soon.

One option we are considering for the GPS issues is the Skyhook SDK.
They use a Wifi network database (combined with GPS, Cell Towers, and
some fancy algorithms) to more accurately and quickly give location
information. We haven't tried it yet, so I don't know if it works as
well as they claim, but they seem eager to have us try it out.

Typo in my last post: the radar goes up to 100km, not 10km.

[ThomasWrobel]

I wrote about some ideas to use existing networks (IRC) to exchange
links to 3d data with the location to display them;
http://www.darkflame.co.uk/sharespace/AR_paper.pdf
If Gamaray implemented something vaguely like this, then people could
write their own bots on IRC to make various types of games and
applications based around temporary/transient, yet shared, data
exchange. Even just letting people post messages in midair, and have
anyone else on that channel see them, would raise plenty of
geolocation game possibilities.

Anyway, just some random ideas :)

Keep up the good work.

-Thomas

[Clayton Lilly]

Thanks Thomas, that's very interesting stuff. My TweetWorld app
(http://www.gamaray.com/tweetworld) was eventually going to have some
of the properties you describe. Right now it just shows a generic 3d
model to represent a tweet, but eventually I was going to have it
parse the tweet and look for a URL that pointed to a mesh. This would
be an easy way for people to "drop" 3d objects at their current
location.

[tarotray]

Here are some suggestions. They may possibly be unfeasible or ill-
thought out, but they are just suggestions:

If you added an <onLngPress> (and maybe even an <onDblPress>) event,
on each feature, it would extend the possiblities greatly.A long press
could do something like bring up a customized menu, which I explain,
below. A user could double press for a different action to the single
press action.

Speaking of actions, there are only 3 available - 'refresh', 'webpage'
and 'dimension'.

As you have pointed out, ''webpage is ill-named and thankfully very
flexible. It can call any intent, which is great. I understand that
you are thinking of having 'intent' as a new action.

However, is it possible to bring up a customized menu, perhaps using
another action, 'menu'? Imaginatively, consider the extra flexibility
this quite simple addition could make to Gamaray. It can't be a huge
amount of Java/Android programming, can it?

Examples of use would be a click on an image displaying a company logo
could take you to the web-site, but a long press could take you to a
menus of alternatives, like call the company, look it up on a map etc.
This is all very Android-compatible behavior, only now linked to
objects in a Gamaray environment.

The hierarchy could be included in the dimension, thus:

<menus>
<menu id="myMenu" >
<menuItem id="Item1">
<name>My 1st Menu Item</name>
<press>dimension: http://www.mydimensionserver.com/AnotherWorld
</press>
<lngpress>menu: my2ndMenu </press>
</menuItem>
<menuItem id="Item2">
<name>My 2nd Menu Item</name>
<press>url: http://www.myfirstsite.com </press>
<lngpress>intent: tel:+5551234567 </press>
</menuItem>
<menuItem id="Item3">
<name>My 3rd Menu Item</name>
<press>url: http://www.mysecondsite.com </press>
</menuItem>
<menuItem id="Item4">
<name>My 4th Menu Item</name>
<press>url: http://www.mythirdsite.com </press>
</menuItem>
</menu>
<menu id="my2ndMenu">
<menuItem id="Item5">
<name>My 4th Menu Item</name>
<press>url: http://www.myfourthsite.com </press>
</menuItem>
</menu>
</menus>

What do you think? Just some ideas....

[Clayton Lilly]

Good suggestions.

My main goal for now is to add just enough features to allow
developers to replicate anything in other AR browsers, so some sort of
menu system might make sense. Long term, I'm still deciding how to
proceed with the overall event/action model.

[BlackWinged]

Another aspect: what about caching?
If I get it right, every model and graphic is loaded from the web,
everytime I start a dimension.
Wouldn´t it be much better if there was a cache on the SD card?

[Clayton Lilly]

SD card caching would a big improvement, but Gamaray does at least
cache models within a session so that it doesn't reload the models
when the dimension is refreshed.