ARToolKit 2.71 released

The ARToolKit team are happy to announce the immediate availability of ARToolKit version 2.71.

The ARToolKit is a collection of libraries, utilities applications, and documentation and sample code aimed at creators of augmented reality applications. The libraries provide the user with a means to capture images from video sources, process those images to optically track markers in the images, and to allow compositing of computer-generated content with the real-world images and display the result using OpenGL.

The release and the full read me is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/artoolkit/ under "File Releases".

There have been several major changes since the last release (2.70.1):

* A new version of the Windows video capture library, DSVideoLib, v0.0.8b has been adopted. This has made the installation process on Windows radically simpler. There is no longer any requirement to install the DirectX SDK, or to run register_filter.bat at random intervals. There are also many bug fixes over the previous DSVideoLib version used by ARToolKit, 0.0.4. Many thanks to Thomas Pintaric for his support of this library.

* On Mac OS X side, XCode builds now build the examples as bundled applications. The contents of the "Data" directory are copied into the application bundle at build time. The applications can thus be moved from their build locations. (The utilities are still (mostly) built as command-line tools.) Also, a performance boost has been realised by adopting thread-safe QuickTime 6.4, which is now required by default. (Support for versions back to 4.0 can be enabled at compile-time if required).

* The calibration utilties have been rewritten to use the newer libARgsub_lite rather than a bunch of unmaintained custom code. They should now run much more reliably across different platforms.

* Documentation of the ARToolKit API is now included in HTML form. While it is reasonably complete, much work remains to be done on the documentation, and we hope you, the users, will assist by improving, reworking and filing "bugs" and corrections that you find. The API documentation is rounded out by a reasonably substantial userguide at http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/documentation/

* The Linux video library has also had some improvements, with a patch by Wayne Piekarski to auto-adjust video resolution.

* Under the hood, various components of ARToolKit are being rewritten to be much more adaptable to changing run time environments. The first step in this process is to allow runtime selection of the video stream pixel format. This has been completed in the Mac, Windows video libraries, and in ARToolKit's GL utility library, libARgsub_lite. A future release will extend this to the core libAR. This should help a lot with deployments of ARToolKit in your open-source applications.

* Other minor fixes, as listed in the README.txt. Download and take a look.

ARToolKit is distributed as a multiple source archive. There are additional source + binary packages for ARToolKit dependencies on the Windows platforms. These include the video input library, DSVideoLib, and OpenVRML. Dependencies for the Unix-based platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Irix) are handled by package managers on these systems (e.g. Fink on Mac OS X, Debian and/or RPM on Linux).

As bugs come up, please post in ARToolKit's bug tracker, kindly provided by SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=116280&atid=674305. This will be the preferred forum for bug reports in future. Patch submissions are also welcomed.

Bugs fixes and other improvements are available between official ARToolKit releases by checking out the source from Sourceforge ARToolKit CVS repository using anonymous CVS. A simple tutorial on how to get the ARToolKit source using a CVS GUI tool is at http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=25731&group_id=116280.

Thanks to all the contributors to this release.