AR.js Studio — A Call to Arms for the first Open Source Web AR Authoring Platform.
AR.js Studio is designed to build Web AR experiences for free, without coding. A Web App to create Web AR apps, and remove the barrier of coding knowledge. This is a Call to Arms to help building this tool.
Let fire burn: Instead of lighting a fire on the teacher’s table, students can do this safely on their own table as an additional, virtual experiment: a fire will appear on top of a marker/image so the student can inspect it, without being in danger.
History: In many German cities, metallic paving stones are used in front of houses on which the names of the persecuted and murdered Jewish inhabitants are written. With the help of geolocalized markers, these can be discovered in one’s own city.
Botanics: The trees and plants around the school are signed with a marker hanged on them. When approaching a tree or plant, many informations can be displayed: text, image, embedded video, audio, to learn more about the trees with a situated experience.
Art: Forget about markers for now. To augment art, every artist or photographer can also use its own picture/draw/painting to display content on top of it, or near it. Only by recognising the actual image - again, not a marker placed somewhere and ruining the whole art scene. What about drawings taking life from the real, physical drawing? Or storytelling in AR, starting from a paint?
What you have just read, are experiences that you can already build with AR.js. The last one, will be available soon on AR.js, but can already be created for free using Open Source jsartoolkit5 (the system underline AR.js).
So, what’s the point of creating another software to build them?
The answer is actually one of the greatest aims ever in Computer Science:
To make possible to people with no technical background, to create technical and innovative experiences.
Talking practically, to create these experiences without coding.
Web AR Authoring Platform
The idea is to provide a Web app that make you build Web AR experiences on-the-fly. No users, roles or login. Just reach the Web app URL, choose your experience (Marker based AR, Location based AR, Image based AR) and start building with a wizard-style flow.
I will add some screenshot from the Whimsical flow — a collaborative tool to create mockups where the focus is on functionalities, not on graphics or design.
After the user has chosen the type of the experience (in the image above, Marker based has been chosen), it is possible to decide which marker to use (custom one or Barcode marker) and a content to show.
The same for Image based and similar for Location based AR (see image below). On Location based, for example, it will be possible to add the places defining longitude and latitude or by choosing a place from a map.
Once you have added one or more anchors, with a specific content for each of them, you are done with the creation phase.
Then, you can decide how to obtain the automatically-generated code. A zip archive, snippets of code shown to be copied&pasted or, connecting a Github account, deploying live, automatically, on Github pages (a free hosting services provided by Github).
Call to Arms
For now, this is just the start. We have well defined ideas, use cases, technologies to use and we have started to build it, a bit. But we need forces.
We have thought to build this platform using Web, standard technologies. We believe in Simple Design principle and also we want to make this development to be as easy as possible.
For such static pages, a Vanilla Javascript approach, along with HTML+CSS can be enough, so we believe it’s a good idea to not rely on any Frontend Framework.
What we need in order to build this, is a Web designer and a couple of Web developers.
We already have some guy working on this for free, in order to have this great tool that will help lot of creative people, from artists, teachers, students to designers and developers.
We have a public Slack Channel, a Google Drive public folder for brainstorming and use cases, and two repositories on Github under the AR.js Github organization.
This is the AR.js organization: https://github.com/AR-js-org. You can see the two projects:
- studio, is the principal one, the frontend application. It features all the web app components we are talking about
- studio-backend, features only the AR.js integration part, and will be used by studio.
If you want to help, read here
To start, you can either write me a mail at nicolocarpignoli@gmail.com and/or ask to join the official AR.js studio slack channel (http://arjs-studio.slack.com/). You will added to the slack channel anyway, in case.
You can check the Whimsical Mockup at this link.
Or look for informations at the public Google Drive folder.
We are searching for people who love to code, to design, to contribute for a game-changing platform for the Web AR ecosystem.
This will be the one of the first authoring platforms for Web AR in OSS. It will help a lot of people and will enable Web AR for everyone, without costs.
If you’re interested, you can also ping me and ask me whatever you want on Twitter (https://twitter.com/nicolocarp).
Hope to hear from you soon guys! 🍻
