3D tracking made easy with "Augmented Reality" AnTS!

AnTS was initially developed as a 2D tracking system to be able to track objects that move on a specific plane. As such, AnTS started growing to include lens distortion features, perspective correction, and a very versatile concept of layered filters to make it possible to customize tracking for virtually any 2D setup.

In the latest version (2.8) we have gone much further an it is now possible to emulate mouse events under windows, what allows you to create single-touch interactive surfaces with absolutely no knowledge. Further, we have also integrated a TUIO server in it (http://www.tuio.org/), which can be used to send touch events to multi-touch systems such as interactive tables or retro-projections. The possibilities for use of AnTS have greatly expanded into the domain of touch and tangible systems. 

The latest upgrade is indeed the built in support to Augmented Reality (AR) tracking. This has been made so easy that you just need to create a squared shaped binary image (bmp, jpg, png) on a black background, print it out and you are ready to go. The AR tracking now allows AnTS to be able to report 6 degrees of freedom on your patterns - (x,y,z) position and (yaw, roll, pitch) orientation - in real time. Since the goal of this AR feature is not to report accurate positions relative to the camera, the calibration of the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters is not required (a default one is used), and the actual printed size of the pattern does not need to be fixed. 

You can watch here a very simple video tutorial on how it works (http://youtu.be/sdcGT06R2-U), and you can freely download it and try it out from the AnTS download page (http://sergibermudez.blogspot.pt/p/ants-downloads.html).