All posts by George Brown

Reality Augmenter Release Notes 1.1.1

Long delay this time, updates were suspended while iOS development was completed. iOS version now released, and this means some new changes for the OSX version that were implemented in iOS.

Unit testing has been greatly extended to cover more core functionality, including the rendering, this picked up some unusual problems that required fixing, further delaying update, but will bring greater benefits in the long term.

New Features

  • Image support, most image formats can now be imported and used as sources.
  • Processors and Sources can now be used as masks, this means you are no longer restricted to circle masks and can use videos, images, syphon, QC and screencapture as inputs. A circle mask is still created an maintained in the application.
  • Mask invert and threshold, as part of the mask updates, individual layers can now invert masks, and define a threshold for mask coverage in greyscale.

Other

  • Fixed occasional rendering glitches picked up by unit testing.
  • Layer updates to setting/unsetting masks, turning layers, masks and overlays on or off are now more reliable and responsive.
  • General code clean and cleaner organisation as part of iOS shared code base.

New XCode 7 Testing Facilities

I’m updating Unit Testing for the next OSX release and see a couple of new features in XCode.

Testing code coverage is nice, it was available before, but wasn’t the easiest to implement. It’s now built in and can be turned on from the Schemes editor, and reports turn up under the reports tab.

The actual code coverage report could be presented better, there doesn’t seem to be any order to it. My coverage isn’t too bad on the underlying model and rendering facilities, but I see some stuff I’ve missed. It also shows classes that I’ve forgotten altogether, while a couple are things I’ve overlooked or put off, A lot of them are to do with my User Interface.

Which brings me to the next added feature in XCode, UI testing. I know there are companies that provide UI testing for xcode, I didn’t see a free one… So I’d been testing manually, but finally it’s been added to XCode 7. I’ll be looking at implementing that too in the future if it looks like it’ll work.

Working on next release for OSX

I’m currently porting some features of the iOS version of the Reality Augmenter back into OSX. This includes the ability to load images, and use custom masks made from any of source types.

So no longer will you be limited to the circle mask for projection mapping in OSX, you’ll be able to use videos, images and quartz compositions to mask your mapped areas.

Next release should be very soon, just tidying up a few odds and ends and need to make sure testing is up to date.

IOS App Update

Got rejected, but not because of the Binary, that’s good, they want a video of how to use it for the review, so I’m busy making that today. I was a bit scared they’d reject it straight away as the application is a little unusual for an iOS device, I was worried the fact it does nothing without a projector connected would just get it instantly rejected, but asking me for a video on how it’s used is encouraging.

The Reality Augmenter iOS

Currently putting the finishing touches to the iOS version of the Reality Augmenter. It’s pretty much feature complete and reliable, just tweaking the user interface and adding final touches.

It’s taken a lot to get here, I wanted to share as much of the code as possible with the OSX version. I’d already stuck to an MVC design pattern which meant most of the iOS work was re-building the view aspect, and rethinking how that would work in an iOS environment. I found the storyboards very easy to pick up and good way to work, and once I’d got the hang of tab and navigation controllers, the basic app built up very quickly.

On the controller side, I’d implemented quite a few things in NSArrayControllers, which aren’t available in iOS, but there wasn’t too much going on in them so could implement some shared classes between iOS and OSX that plugged into the original array controllers and provided the functionality I needed in iOS.

The toughest part was upgrading openGL. Originally the OSX version used a legacy profile because of the Quartz Composer functionality. While there is a fixed function pipeline in ES1, I really wanted to be able to use later versions of ES, which meant upgrading the original to core profile. This means practically all of the openGL code is shared between OSX and iOS, with only different shaders supporting the differences between core and ES. I could probably work on a shader compiler to further reduce differences, but for now I just have different shaders for different versions.

Of course, now there is Metal, and Swift has been taking off too. Once I complete the iOS version, and migrate it’s new features into the OSX version, I’ll be looking to switch the code base over to Swift and Metal.