iN 2011, I developed a concept Augmented Reality application for newspapers, As part of a school project. The premise was that newspapers are ideal for information discovery. They have a huge surface and nice readable text and are easy to hold. No smartphone or tablet will be able to compete with that any time soon. The application allows a newspaper article to be scanned in real time, so that more information can be downloaded to the device. This could be extra text, images video, etc. Additionally adds could be scanned, allowing the user to put items directly into a shopping basket and purchasing them very rapidly.
Some of the initial sketches were done with the excellent Balsamiq Mockups app. Afterwards the interface was put together in Photoshop. Most of the buttons and graphics were made to scale, so that the app would work well on the HTC Legend and the HTC Desire.
The app was pretty snappy and responsive on the Desire, but The Legend lacked the power to run the Augmented Reality effect properly. The app uses the AndAR library to recognize the marker. AndAR was chosen due to its simplicity and support for the available Legend and Desire test phones.
This project was my first time using Android, and also the first time using Java, which I was able to pick up rapidly due to the excellent Head First Java book. The steep learning curve made the first weeks a very interesting experience.
Check out the demo video below and see what the app could do:
