Start coding “Augmented Reality”

You don’t need one of those expensive Virtual Reality (VR) headsets to learn how to write “Augmented Reality” (AR) programs. All you need is a mobile device that has a built-in camera and a few built-in sensors. And most of the smart phones today (iphone, android phones, etc.) are equipped to handle the basic AR.

In this post, I will share a quick summary of how I started to learn AR and I am still very early in the journey. So a disclaimer first, some of the conclusions and comparison among different AR frameworks might not be correct! In that case, please leave me a comment and I will correct them.

Starting Point

What is AR? According to the Oxford dictionary, it is “A technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world, thus providing a composite view”.

The first thing to learn anything is to do an internet search and read a few technology summary articles. One of the first I read was this. This list of AR frameworks mentioned in this article is no way close to being comprehensive. Especially since it was written at the end of Y2017, a lot of advances have been made since then in the area of AR. In addition, it didn’t cover some of the web based AR frameworks (such as AR.js with AFrame).

Hands-on Practice

The second thing to learn anything is to have an easy-to-follow hands-on exercise. The first AR example I follow is this article “Creating Web-Based Augmented Reality With Just 10 Lines of HTML Code (For Beginners — AR.js)”. You can experience a simple “marker” based AR with either no code at all (using their hosted link) or with literally 10 lines of code. Of course, I expect this simple example will lead you to read more about AR.js, AFrame, three.js, babylon.js, WebAR. But this example is quite self-explanatory even with no prior knowledge of these frameworks. If you are interested in WebAR / WebXR experimental framework, this post also provides a good tutorial.

Which AR Framework to Choose?

After the initial fun and thrill of hands-on AR, now we need to think seriously about which framework to use for development? There are so many choices! Web based or Native App based? Open Source or Commercial?

I am always a big fan of web. So at first, my natural inclination was to use AR.js with Aframe. Even though the basic AR functionalities worked well and pretty easy to learn, I had encountered…