Prototyping Augmented Reality

CHAPTER 7

Interacting with the Physical World

Until now, we've taken the concept of “reality” in augmented reality to mean essentially live video. The camera has been the only “sensory” input about the real world to which your sketches have had access. But AR can potentially take advantage of a much wider range of sensors. Working with such sensors to create software that interacts with the world more closely is part of physical computing. Physical computing has enjoyed a huge boom lately in part because of the availability of inexpensive, easy-to-use hardware programming interfaces called microcontrollers. The best known of these is the Arduino microcontroller. In this chapter, you'll see how to use Arduino to incorporate input from a simple ...