Chapter 1. Augmented Reality using Appcelerator Titanium Starter

Welcome to Augmented Reality using Appcelerator Titanium.

Advances in technology are driven by a need. Some of the greatest advances are made during wars, the computer revolution being one of them. I doubt we will ever know the full extent of the advances made with computers during the Second World War, but they were significant. After the war ended Manchester, England became home to a team of leading academics and industry experts, where the Manchester Baby was born. This has now been replicated at the Science Museum in Manchester, and was the first fully functioning computer as we know them today.

Today a mobile phone has more processing power than these early room-size computers, but it still has limitations. Mobile devices are becoming more powerful, more usable, and more widespread. With the introduction of the iPhone, a revolution in mobile technology occurred. But mobile devices have limited processing power, storage, and memory compared to a desktop computer and this is often forgotten or ignored. When developing applications for mobile devices these considerations need to be taken into account as the applications perform badly if they aren’t.

Developing an Augmented Reality application is no different. In fact more consideration has to be taken for the device it needs to run on. This type of application displays lots of data, moves it continually around the screen, and resizes components, resulting in using the device's processing power to the maximum. A lot of time and effort is spent in coding, to minimize the amount of processing required. In a lot of cases it is just too much for the device to handle cleanly.

This book explains a solution to implementing Location-based Augmented Reality . The solution provided has been coded using the Appcelerator Titanium Framework but it can be applied to most other frameworks and native solutions. It is aimed at the developers; although all the code is available and is well commented, it is not aimed at novice coders.

If you are currently implementing or thinking about Augmented Reality this book is for you. It shows a solution which works effectively, using an open source example application, augmentedTi. We will cover the latest Titanium APIs, coding methods, and best practices.

This book contains the following sections:

So what is Augmented Reality? – This section gives a brief overview of what Augmented Reality can be.

Installation – This section shows you how to obtain and install the augmentedTi application from bitbucket into Titanium Studio.

The application architecture – This section dives into the open source code base on the augmentedTi example application, explaining how it has been implemented.

Augmented Reality – This section explains the augmented reality solution provided within the augmentedTi application.

People and places you should get to know – This section provides you with many useful links to the project page and forums, as well as a number of helpful articles, tutorials, blogs, and the Twitter feeds of some useful people to follow.