Like probably many a thousand Flash coders right now, we’ve been looking at FLARToolkit, and the “augmented reality” solutions it makes possible. If you want to try it out, Mikko Haapoja’s FLARToolkit tutorial is an excellent starting point. He’s also been kind enough to make a pretty tutorial package so you can forget about downloading the (currently broken) trunk distribution from the SVN.

As you can see on their site, FLARToolkit is an AS3-conversion of NyARToolkit, which in turn is a Java-conversion of the original ARToolkit, written in C. Having seen the FLARToolkit in use commercially (the GE SmartGrid campaign comes to mind), I find it pretty interesting that all uses of FLARToolkit are subject to the requirements of the GPL license, originating from ARToolkit. In particular, the license requires derived works to be fully open sourced. Let’s see if we can get a client to accept that…

We will surely try to do something with the FLARToolkit, but we will be also looking at other, more light-weight approaches.