Developing and authoring mixed reality with MX toolkit

Abstract

This paper describes a software platform oriented to the augmented reality/mixed reality application developer, aiming at simplifying his/her programming tasks. This platform comprises a software development kit (SDK) for the Windows environment, consisting of a set of C++ classes packaged into modules. The platform is known as MX toolkit and utilises extensively the AR toolkit, for all matters regarding marker-based tracking, but is defined at a somewhat higher abstraction level than the AR toolkit software layer, by hiding from the programmer, low level implementation details and facilitating AR/MR object-oriented programming. The MX toolkit is presented by means of a comparison with the AR toolkit processing pipeline and API and by explaining its eight system modules. We expect to provide this package as an aid for AR toolkit-based applications development. The paper also describes a visual AR/MR authoring tool, the Mix It application, from the user interface point of view, as an illustration of the development support potential of the MX toolkit SDK.