Although the ‘Augmented Reality’ technology must be around 10 years old (not sure though), I’ve been hearing about it quite a bit lately. It seems like a lot of mobile and web applications (and games for some time now, of course) that are using this technology are coming up lately and, well, I’ve always found it pretty cool :). I was curious about it so I wanted to try to find out how it works and play with it a little bit (I’m not a developer or anything like that, but I’m kind of persistent fighting against the code :) ). So I’ve found FLARToolKit, an AS3 ported version of ARToolKit, and what probably is the reason why is becoming kind of popular in web applications since it allows to use this technology with Flash. Using Papervision3D as the 3D engine and a lot of resources and documentation from all around the web to figure this thing out, the result is this small test.
NOTE: There’s some shading problems that I need to solve (I know Papervision3D doesn’t like something about the mesh I’ve used, but I still have check what’s going on), but as soon as I fix it I’ll update this post.

1.- First you need to print the marker where the 3D object is going to stick to, so you need a printer and some paper :) You can download it here

2.- Second, you need a webcam. Once you have the marker, click on the logo below and a small window will open. It will ask you for permission to access to your camera, so you have to click on ‘Allow’. You’ll see where your camera is pointing at on the screen, so now you just have to place the marker right in front of the camera.