hitsthings
commented
3 years ago Hey mate! Thanks a ton for messaging me!
I really, really wanted to get this through when I started, but there were a lot of hurdles and other priorities got in the way. With three kids and a fledgling business, I'd be lying if I said things had changed, but I would be more than happy to put in a couple hours a week to help out if you want to run with it. To be clear, I'm also not a Computer Vision expert! I was just trying to translate the white paper into code to the best of my ability. Initially I wanted to use it with a quadcopter back in the day when Nodecopters were all the rage to make an autonomous one.
The first thing I tried was to take the C PTAM library itself and just add Node bindings to it. However I had a lot of problems getting it to compile on my computer. At the time I was using a Windows machine, and the library is built for Linux, so there were a lot of missing dependencies. I'm not sure what your goal is, but in the days of Windows Subsystem for Linux, the C library might be a better bet?
This repo was my second attempt, using the white paper to try to rebuild the library in JS. I think the main thing that stopped me was just running out of time, but there were also performance concerns and general difficulty for me in understanding some of the math (quaternions and matrices still make my head spin). Some of them might be solved by the new-fangled SharedArrayBuffer which will drastically reduce IO since the mapping and tracking threads can pass data around without so much overhead.
Let me know if you have any questions I could help with! Keen to hear what you had in mind for updating this! Like I said, I'd love to help, but also won't be able to put major hours into it. If there's a small piece you could use help with, I'm happy to take it on.
Cheers, Adam
ThorstenBux
Hi @hitsthings, how are you? I just read your latest blog entry and am amazed at how many parallels we have roughly looking at our professional work life. But also family life. But I leave that for another day.
I'm a passionate WebAR developer and Co-founder of the WebARKit organization on GitHub (non-profit currently). We aim to be the go-to place for OpenSource Augmented Reality on the Web.
Looking for a starting point to implement surface tracking, I came across PTAM and with that to PTAMJS. I made it run and cleaned up this 8-year-old JavaScript code and feel a bit dusty right now ;). There is still a lot to do to bring it up to modern JavaScript. However, in an interest to move fast I thought I'd reach out to you and ask for help implementing the missing bits for a PoC of PTAMJS. Humbly speaking I consider myself a good (Web-) Developer and WebAR expert, however, when it comes to Computer Vision I still have a lot to learn. If you would have time to push forward on this project or to guide me along the way I would appreciate it very much. In fact, I already appreciate that you took the time to read my long message, thank you.
Kind regards and best wishes to NSW (does your new home still count as Sydney?) I lived in Sydney at some point in 2008. Anyway, all the best from Christchurch, NZ.
Thorsten