JsartoolkitNFT our small libraries for WebAR has arrived to 0.9.1 version, and you can install as a module with npm:

npm install @kalwalt/jsartoolkit-nft

We will publish in the webarkit scoped name when it will be almost stable. We will advise you in our blog with all the informations.

We didn’t make any improve apart the Typescript langauage conversion, there are still some little refinements to do in the code, that is planned to realize.

In regards of the new Typescript feature, you don’t need to download any other typed library, types folder is present in the root folder, so everything you need to do is to install the package and import it in you project:

import AR from "@kalwalt/jsartoolkit-nft"

If you are developing on a Javascript or Typescript ambient this does the same. But in a Typescript environnment you will get all of the advantages, let say intellisense support and type checking.

We are sure that you will develop many interesting projects with it. Let us know on what are you working!

See you in a next Blog article!

That is the most important news, our request was accepted some days before Christhmas, what better gift! Netlify is a well known web service. Another important news: we have also our OpenCollective profile: WebArKit; we have just started this journey, so wait until we have finish the setup.

A lot of discussions and sharing of ideas about the future of WebARKit and ARnft, for sure in the next weeks , month we will release a new improved version of ARnft and probably the first WebAR Kit version. We don’t set up a milestone or a releasing date, but we are working on this.

Recently i have also relased a new ARnft version with some nice features see this PR, this is about Threejs rendering system. I added some important event listeners that let you built more advanced stuff. I also removed the Ofscreencanvas that was causing an issue.

About Arnft: our idea is to make ARnft more agnostic in rispect to every rendering engine. Our plan is to evolve it to a modular system in which the developer may choose his preferred render engine (Three.js, Babylonjs….) without any constrictions. For doing this we will switch to a typed script version of the library, that will let us more freedom and will add more flexibility.

If you want partecipate to the discussion, join us on the discussions board see this topic: The Future of ARnft and WebARKit 

More to come…

Latest news in the WebARKit organization

What happened in the WebARKit community? ARnft and JsartoolkitNFT news…

Our team member and co-founder @kalwalt has transferred ownership of its repositories ARnft and JsartoolkitNFT to the WebARKit organization, to be completely part of this project. They are two little libraries for WebAR based on the WebARKitLib C++ library derived from Artoolkit5 but with only the strict necessary for WebAR. The features of ARnft and JsartoolkitNFT are: marker tracking with NFT technology (Natural Feature Tracking), ES6 standard support, modularity, Threejs rendering engine. We plan to add new features to them: Multi NFT support, other useful methods, support for other rendering engines/libraries like AframeVR, Babylon.js, performances improves. In the next weeks/month we will add some of these.

Website improvement

Our website is based on Jekyll static generator, we had change the theme for a better styling based on Bulma. We used the bulma-clean-theme, very easy to setup with nice support for Mobile. But the most important news about our website is the PWA feature. Now it can be installed as an app in the user machine, with all the tools included.

Tools and Examples in the Website

We added two new page to our WebAR Kit website: Tools and Examples.

Tools

We will host here some useful tools for WebAR. For now we added the great tool that let you create your own NFT markers, the NFT Marker Creator.

Examples

We will show our code examples here, you will find here examples with ARnft, jsartoolkitNFT, jsartoolkit5, ArtoolkitX.js and all the future libraries projects…

Future plans and devlopment

We are working to a new WebAR markerless solution, we hope that this will be a reality in a near future. We are expanding our base lib WebARkitLib with a new concept and code design. Stay tuned!

News about the development

We are pleased to present our new WebAR Kit Blog page. In this blog we will keep you updated on the news that have happened within the WebAR Kit community. We will generally publish at least one article every three months and if possible more often to keep you updated.

What has happened so far in the WebAR Kit community?

I personally started creating a simplified version of Artoolkit with only NFT support, it’s called WebARKitLib. The code is pretty much the same but it’s very light because all unnecessary parts for Natural Feature Tracking have been removed. That is, all the code for the old marker style was stripped away. The final code is only 19.7 mb against the almost 500 mb of the old repository. I have used this library with JsartoolkitNFT and ARnft with excellent results. Thosten Bux instead added partial support for NFT markers and 2d tracking to the ArtoolkitX.js project, it is essential to complete the implementation for the NFT but we are on the right track.

Worth noting is the great work that Thorsten Bux and Daniel Fernandes have done for the online Web Service version of the NFT-creator-WS (here the repository of the code) a very useful tool for those who want to work with this type of markers.

Unfortunately as regards WebARStudio, some improvements have been made but not yet for the NFT markers, it is in fact necessary to develop the part of the code to support the version with Web Worker required for Mobile devices. I hope to accomplish this upgrade in a timely, because it is a long awaited feature…

An interesting mention should be made for the CSS renderer developed by Daniel Fernandes based on the Threejs CSS3D renderer, many interesting possibilities open up with this project !!

Finally, the icing on the cake is the incredible work done by hiukim mind-ar-js, he has in fact translated the Artoolkit code concerning the NFT with gpu.js, creating a version completely made for the GPU!! For sure this will be the future of augmented reality… Obviously the code needs to be improved and most likely the algorithm needs to be changed. But in the meantime: Very good hiukim! Great! If you are interested, follow us and subscribe to our web page or follow our Twitter profile @WebarkitO, and if you want to get in touch with us to participate and contribute to the project, let’s meet in our slack channel, we are open for collaborations. Stay tuned!