RenderHeads worked as technology partners with Moving Brands to help them create an augmented reality web interface, which formed part of the release of Moving Brand's Living Identity paper.

A New Interaction
Augmented reality applications are becoming increasingly popular, and are now starting to bubble up as web applications. However the majority of AR applications on the web just spring up (and maybe animate) a 3D model on top of the marker. Moving Brands had the vision for something a little different. They believe that branding shouldn't stand still; that a brand should be as dynamic as the world around it. This is the core message of their new 'Living Identity' paper, a small book launched during the 2009 London Design Festival.

Moving Brands know that simply by the nature of print-based media, the book was out of date by the time it was in the hands of the reader. They wanted to keep the book current so we gave it a 'living' cover - an augmented reality overlay that displays live Moving Brands content.

As well as serving as the display, the cover of the book is also a means of navigating the content. Rotating the cover selects between their Flickr, blog, Vimeo and Twitter feeds. Moving the book to the far left or right of the screen allows you to navigate backwards or forwards through whichever feed you are viewing. You can also 'knock' the book left or right to navigate through the feeds. You can scroll long sections of text by tilting the book backwards or forwards.

Visiting the Moving Brands Living Identity blog to experience the application for yourself.

FLARToolKit + FLARManager
Nearly all AR applications on the web, including ours, use FLARToolKit. On top this a few use FLARManager, an addition to FLARToolKit that provides extended functionality. We would like to extend a big thank you to the authors of both these libraries. Without your work this project would not have been possible.

AR Book Cover was written in ActionScript 3.0 using the Adobe Flex Builder 3 IDE. For marker interaction we used the FLARToolKit library as well as FLARManager. We used Papervision 3D for the rendering engine. We used the BulkLoader library to help us load our content files. We created our own FeedRipper module to pull live content from different social media websites into the application. All the software was prototyped, designed and written within three weeks, working remotely.








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