With the constant development of Internet and electronic media, more and more information are available in an electronic format. With the goal to make a bridge between this electronic world and the traditional print-based information (newspaper etc…), the PixLive SDK is a perfect match for this problem.

This document presents how to use the VDARSDK for cross-media application by using the provided cross-media sample application.

Introduction

In order to properly follow this guide, the instructions given in the PixLive SDK Programming Guide to compile the localization-based sample application had to be successfully executed before following this guide. Namely, you should have already created one or more AR Models in your PixLive Maker account.

The idea to use the VDARSDK for cross-media applications is the following:

• You have a paper version of a newspaper associated with digital content such as videos, weblinks and more.
• The VDARSDK can be configured to recognize articles or advertisements and to eventually present the associated electronic information to the users.
• Thanks to the versatility of the VDARSDK, one can even design augmented reality content to be displayed on top of the article. Think for exemple to a picture of a movie. You could, for example, configure one AR Model to display a preview video of the movie in place of the real movie picture. It would then look “as if” the movie would be part of the newspaper. Many other effects can be done to improve even more the static print content with digital information.

In this document, we will concentrate ourselves with the following use-case:

• We have a paper version of a newspaper coming out every day, named ‘My Newspaper’
• For different articles, some electronic content is created
• We have an iPhone / iOS application ‘My Newspaper’ available on the App Store. This application currently allows subscribers to view the latest news which haven’t been yet printed out.
• We want to add a new feature to our ‘My Newspaper’ app. in order to include an augmented reality technology to automatically bring electronic contents related to the articles of the paper version of the newspaper.

AR Model Tags and Newspaper articles

As we will have a new newspaper issue everyday, we don’t want to the users of our iPhone application to have all the AR Models of all the issues as it would take too much download time. In order to have a fast system, the easiest way to send to users the AR Models for the today issue is to use the tag mechanism in PixLive Maker.

In order to create to associate some digital content with a newspaper article, the following procedure should be observed:

1. Create a new AR Model in PixLive Maker by providing the article image
2. When asked for a tag, enter the following tag: MyNewspaperIssue-YYYY-mm-dd where YYYY corresponds to the newspaper issue year, mm corresponds to the newspaper issue month, and dd corresponds to the newspaper issue day. For example, of the today date is 2011-08-23, then you should enter the following tag: MyNewspaperIssue-2011-08-23. Note that the MyNewspaperIssue- prefix is set in the application sample that will be compiled hereafter. It’s up to you to choose the tag you want but you have to report the change in the iPhone application.
3. Create the AR Content with the PixLive Maker for your model.
4. Publish your AR Model by clicking on the Publish button on the AR Model page. By default, the sample cross-media application provided with the VDARSDK, which will simulate our ‘My Newspaper’ app augmented reality feature, is configured to download all the models tagged with the current date tag formatted as described above. If old models are already present on the phone, they are deleted and everything is kept synchronized with the server to have the latest AR Models any time.

Cross-media iOS Application

After having created your AR Models corresponding to the newspaper article as described in the previous section, you can now compile and install the sample cross-media application provided with the SDK. You will find in the following directory inside the SDK distribution:

    demo/MyCrossMediaApp/MyCrossMediaApp.xcodeproj

Before you can compile and install the above project on your device, you have to adjust your license key in the source code. To do so, open the MyCrossMediaAppViewController.m file in the Xcode project and modify the line number 30 as follow:

    NSString *MyLicenseKey=@"aabbccdd";

aabbccdd will actually be your license key. You have to use your real license key , which you can find in AR SDK –> My licenses in PixLive Maker.

After having done this small modification, you can compile and install the application right on your devices.

By launching the application, the today AR Models corresponding to the today newspaper articles will be automatically downloaded and after a few seconds you can point your iPhone or iOS device to the newspaper article to get your digital content displayed.

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