Augmented Reality and the base of the original ARToolkit has taken the flash world by storm with the FLARToolkit and really the speed updates of the AVM2 in Flash9 and Flash10 to be able to pull off the OpenCV calculations needed on the bitmap data from each frame of a camera. It has been around quite some time but now web based engines such as Flash and now Processing can take advantage of this awesome technology.

The Simple ARToolKit Library for Processing (PC) is just a basic port of single marker AR support and it currently only runs on windows.

Den Ivanov did some cool experiments with this kit but adding the capability to do multiple markers.  In his videos the processing runtime seems to process the render pretty quickly.  It seems that most Flash AR is around like 5-10 frames per second for the detection.

*mute the sound*

ARToolkit for processing tests from den ivanov on Vimeo.

The FLARToolKit is doing some of this cool in Flash.  This little toolkit is pretty sweet mapping points and sets of points to patterns, colors or other visual queues that technology can latch onto.  Combine this with a webcam and you have some pretty cool AR.

Desktop Fireworks from Saqoosha on Vimeo.

Found via today and tomorrow:

I’ve been following the development of FLARToolKit for some time now and it’s getting more interesting day by day. What it is? FLARToolKit is a Flash Actionscript port of ARToolKit, a software library for building Augmented Reality applications. Huh? Maybe you’ve seen some really cool Augmented Reality videos before. The FLARToolKit will bring all of this to your webbrowser when you have a webcam and a recent Flash Player.

This is one of the most exciting Flash things I’ve seen for a while now. Saqoosha, a Japanese Flash developer, made this little demo: Desktop Fireworks. You will need a the Flash Player 9, a webcam and you’ll need to print out this marker. I’ve already did some tests together with Papervision3D and I can say we’ll probably see more of this soon. This is Flash at it’s best baby!