API Development

ARTi is Augmented Reality for Titanium

My name is Conrad Fuhrman and I’m a Partner at ThreeSphere along with Anthony Ernst. Over the last month Appcelerator has invited us to develop ARTi, an application that provides a base for Titanium developers to start experimenting with augmented reality. ThreeSphere is a development firm near Chicago, IL that specializes in mobile, web, and next generation technologies for everyday business needs. Using nothing more than the tools already provided with Titanium 1.5.1, in less than four weeks, my team of developers (Eric Niccum, Andrew Sears and myself), designed, and produced this application for the developer community.

The core of this application will hopefully spark Titanium developers to push for more advanced and different applications. It truly shows what can be done with tools provided in its raw forms. ARTi is released under the Apache 2.0 license and is available to all that want to play with it. We hope that by putting tools like this into your hands, that community developers can focus around hacking, forking, and generally improving the applications that are produced. ARTi, we feel, is a great stepping stone towards this goal.

If you are looking to improve or develop more around the ARTi code, consider adding the following tools and enhancements:

 

  • Accelerometer Controls
  • Converting 2D Matrices to 3D
  • Updating information based on location
  • Additional Facebook improvements like checkin

As you might have already seen from the webcast, an external Facebook module was developed for this application. While this will be rolled into the next sub release of Titanium mobile, you can currently use it for ARTi and see how it works from a basic fashion. While there is no direct documentation on how to use the Facebook module at this time, reviewing the code for a bit will lend itself to the knowledge needed. Probably the greatest part about the Facebook module is that it supports single sign-on and fast app switching. It also uses the graph API instead of the older Connect system which is being phased out.

The development time that our team took was close to a total of 80 hours of programming, and around 5 – 10 for design. This combined time allowed for a rich development path and enough time to troubleshoot the basics of implementation and testing.

If you download ARTi and do something cool with it, please let us know! We love to see what the community is working on, and we are more than happy to help supply you the tools to do so! If you are interested in our services, we encourage you to contact us directly. I can be reached at Conrad@ThreeSphere.com and Anthony at Anthony@ThreeSphere.com. We thank Appcelerator for the opportunity to showcase what we can do with their incredible software in such a short time.

Here’s a screencast of ARTi running in the Simulator and we promise to get the source code out soon.