ARToolKit is the world’s most popular library for augmented reality application development. With a ten-year development pedigree, an active community edition with thousands of users, and ongoing development incorporating the latest results of augmented reality research, ARToolKit is the smart developers choice.

Benefits of ARToolKit Professional:

1. The world’s most widely used and trusted optical tracking library for augmented reality
   

2. Provides reliable, low cost, adaptable, scalable object tracking for augmented and virtual reality applications
   

3. Deployed in thousands of commercial and open-source projects, with a large and expert user community
   

4. Supported across multiple platforms and architectures, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Irix.
   

5. No expensive hardware required. Supports a huge variety of consumer and professional webcams and cameras.
   

6. Simple C-based interface allows you to start developing your own applications in minutes. Clean OO-design allows incorporation into the most complex of system architectures.

Why license ARToolKit Professional?

1. Commercial licenses allow you to incorporate ARToolKit into your closed-source product.
   

2. Access significant new features including:
   

3. 2D barcoding for improved robustness and scalability
   

4. new algorithms for pose-estimation, providing market-leading accuracy
   

5. high-definition camera support, new video formats, non-square pixel support, and new lens models.
   

6. Get priority support from and access to the developers of ARToolKit — available only with an ARToolKit Professional license.
   

7. Leverage major improvements in SDK architecture, usability and features over older open-sourced releases, including improved object-oriented design.
   

8. Start now with the growth path for emerging tracking methods, including patent-pending 2D planar Natural Feature Tracking for markerless applications.
   

More information on license categories and pricing...

Quick clicks:

1. ARToolKit Professional support library
   

2. ARToolKit Professional community forum
   

3. Downloads
   

4. ARToolKit v2.x (GPL)

ARToolKit Professional Features:

1. Tracking of fiducial markers (black and white marker squares with user-definable patterns) in video streams, and compositing of computer-generated content to produce video-overlay or see-through augmented reality objects.
   

2. Video stream acquisition from a large variety of cameras and video sources, including professional IIDC firewire cameras, consumer level USB web cameras, digital video, and a variety of specialist video capture sources.
   

3. Integration with OpenGL for production of AR content and high-speed video pass-through, plus rendering of high-level graphical content and animations in Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) v2 and X3D format.
   

4. Supports specialised pose-estimation techniques which provide superb pose-estimation accuracy, plus stochastic robust pose-estimation for multi-marker tracking.
   

5. Support for a variety of lens models and optical calibration techniques, including ARToolKit v2 lens models, and ARToolKit v4 enhanced lens models. Simple to use OpenCV-based calibration utilities allow users to accurately and automatically calculate lens characteristics of the cameras in use.
   

6. Multiple video streams can be captured simultaneously, and dynamically switched, or multiplexed for stereo and / or multi-user/single-CPU AR applications.
   

7. Acquisition from pre-recorded and live-streamed remote sources, including QuickTime, Video for Windows, RTSP streaming, MPEG4 and 3GPP streams.
   

8. Modern object-oriented API design allows multiple tracker instances, supporting applications with multiple users and stereo AR.
   

9. Advanced 2D-barcode support for high-speed tracking in applications with a large number of markers and / or reduced requirement for human-readable markers. 2D barcodes can be mixed with pictorial markers if required.
   

10. Multi-platform support, including Linux and Unix 32 and 64-bit variants, Windows, Mac OS X, Mac OS X 64-bit.
    

11. High-speed, low CPU-usage tracking scales well across different CPU speeds and capabilities.
    

12. Line-of-sight inference from head-mounted cameras.

ARToolKit is not only the world’s most popular AR tracking library; it provides the core upon which sophisticated capabilities such as natural feature tracking can build.

About the free ARToolKit version 2

ARToolKit version 2 is an earlier version of ARToolKit Professional and is available open-source and free for non-commercial use under the GNU Public License version 2 (GPLv2).

It provides the ARToolKit tracker and calibration utilities (circa 2002), a set of modern video-input libraries, OpenGL and OpenVRML rendering libraries, and a full set of examples and documentation.

The GPL requires that any application incorporating the software also be open-source under the GPL. This allows people to become familiar with ARToolKit in a low-cost fashion.

A huge community of users of ARToolKit version 2 exists, and obtaining support and input is easy.

If you have successfully created an AR application using the open-source ARToolKit version 2, congratulations! If you would like to sell your creation, you’ll need a license for ARToolKit Professional version 4.
The commercially licensed ARToolKit Professional version 4 represents the continued output of ARToolKit’s original authors, and incorporates the latest in tracking methods. We believe that you’ll find it a significant jump in performance, stability and features.

Home page for ARToolKit version 2...

More:

Download ARToolKit Professional product brief:

ARTW product brief 01043-r3.pdf

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