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Serious Gaming With Flash Augmented Reality


FlarToolkit is an open source code library for Augmented Reality in Flash.

FLARToolKit is an AS3 version for the ARToolKit.
ARToolKit is a software library for building Augmented Reality (AR) applications. These are applications involve the overlay of virtual imagery on the real world.

ARToolKit was originally developed by Dr. Hirokazu Kato, and its ongoing development is being supported by the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (
HIT Lab) at the University of Washington, HIT Lab NZ at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and ARToolworks, Inc, Seattle.

NOTE: Please find also my prior posting
Serious Games and Imaginality and Serious Games Revolutionizing Children's Reading.

One of the key challenges in developing Augmented Reality applications is about tracking the users’ viewpoint. In order to know from what viewpoint to draw virtual imagery, the application needs to know where the user is looking at in the real world.

ARToolKit uses computer vision algorithms to solve this problem. The ARToolKit video tracking libraries calculate the real camera position and orientation relative to physical markers in real time. This enables the easy development of a wide range of Augmented Reality applications. Some of the features of ARToolKit include:

  • Single camera position/orientation tracking.
  • Tracking code that uses simple black squares.
  • The ability to use any square marker patterns.
  • Easy camera calibration code.
  • Fast enough for real time AR applications.
  • SGI IRIX, Linux, MacOS and Windows OS distributions.
  • Distributed with complete source code.
ARToolKit website contains links to the ARToolKit software, projects that have used ARToolKit, sample ARToolKit applications, a discussion group and full documentation. All the information needed to be able to easily develop AR applications with ARToolKit can be found there.