ARpoise : Augmented Reality point of interest service environment

The geolocative ARpoise client app runs on most iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, and is available in the Apple App Store and in the Google Play store.

On your mobile device, download ARpoise for Android from the Google Play store or ARpoise for iOS from the Apple App Store.

ARpoise for mobile devices is currently used for the following projects

• Brush the Sky (San Jose, CA edition) by Tamiko Thiel and /p, launched October 2019. Commissioned for the Hidden Histories of San Jose Japantown project, sponsored by the Japanese American Museum of San Jose with support from the California History Center and Euphrat Museum, both of DeAnza College. Download self-guided AR tour here.)
  
  
• Evolution of Fish, by Tamiko Thiel and /p, launched May 2019.
  
  
• Homenaje a Lucio Fontana, by Alejandro Schianchi, launched June 2019.
  
  
• Reign of Gold, by Tamiko Thiel and /p. Originally created in the Layar app in 2011, re-launched in ARpoise and AR-vos in December 2019.
  
  
• Lotus Meditation, by Tamiko Thiel and /p, launched March 2019. Commissioned for Kennin-ji, the oldest Zen temple in Kyoto.
  
  
• Unexpected Growth, by Tamiko Thiel and /p, launched September 2018. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and part of the permanent collection.

Creating an open source Augmented Reality platform:

Although commercial companies will continue to drive the development of cutting edge technical advances in 3d environment mapping and image recognition technology, there are many forms of AR that are relatively simple to implement and are very useful for academic and artistic purposes.

• We started the open source augmented reality platform ARpoise to address these issues, beginning with the technically simple GPS based geolocative augmented reality in 2018 on the ARpoise app.
  
  
• We expanded it to incorporate image trigger technology in 2019 with the AR-vos app, which is based on Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore technologies.
  
  
• We want to create a community that will help us expand the system to include the SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) technology which is the focus of ARKit and ARCore, and in the future adapt the platform further to accomodate new forms of AR as the technology progresses.

Want to help develop the platform?

The existing code includes:

• Unity3d based client software for the ARpoise app and AR-vos app for both Android and iOS devices.
• 3D content for augments is not built into the client apps - the clients download it from web content servers as Unity asset bundles.
• This allows content creators to adjust their augments dynamically, independently of the client app code and therefore without needing to push new versions of the client to the App and Play stores.
• For these dynamic adjustments of AR content in the field on mobile devices, we have set up the "porPOIse" back-end web service, implemented as a PHP online form.
• For both ARpoise and AR-vos clients, AR experiences can either be visible all over the world, or geo-fenced to be viewable only within areas defined by specific GPS coordinates.

Ideally, it would include these further steps:

• improvement of the user interface to the porPOIse web service for setting up and adjusting augments.
• integration of various glasses

Contact ARpoise project leaders

public@arpoise.com Peter Graf & Tamiko Thiel

Peter Graf is a software developer with over 25 years of experience and a pioneer in web server design - he helped bring the New York Times online for the first time back in 1995. He will consult on and guide further development as a technical advisor.

Tamiko Thiel is an internationally recognized augmented reality artist and co-founder of the legendary augmented reality artist group Manifest.AR. She participated in Manifest.AR's highly regarded guerrilla AR intervention into the Museum of Modern Art New York in 2010, and led their guerrilla intervention into the Venice Biennale in 2011 (See excerpt from Whitney Museum New Media Curator Christiane Paul's reference book Digital Art). Her official participations and commissions include venues such the Istanbul Biennale (official parallel project), the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, FACT Liverpool, Ars Electronica, the Zero1 Biennial in Silicon Valley, the Seattle Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She has taught AR as an art form at the Berlin University of the Arts (Germany), Duke University (USA), Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) and the University of Art and Design Linz (Austria). As the head of packaging design for Thinking Machines Corporation in the mid-1980s she is on the Honor Roll of the IT History Society for the visual form of the Connection Machine CM-1/CM-2 and a co-holder of TMC's patent for a "Method for Interconnecting Processors in Hyper-Dimensional Array" for the Connection Machine CM-1 parallel supercomputer. One of the few surviving CM-2s is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She will accompany the development process as advisor in the areas of functionality and user interface.