I am trying to create a small Android app with reasonably simple AR functionality - load a few known markers and render known 2D/3D objects on top of the video stream when those are detected. I would appreciate any pointers to a library for doing this, or at least a decent example of doing it right.
Here are some leads I have looked into:
AndAR - https://code.google.com/p/andar/ - This starts out great, and the AndAR app works well enough to render one cube on a single pattern on a real-time video stream, but it looks like the project is effectively abandoned, and to extend it I'll have to go heavily into OpenGL land - not impossible, but very undesirable. The follow-up AndAR Model Viewer project, which supposedly lets you load custom .obj files, doesn't seem to recognize the marker at all. Once again, this looks very much abandonware, and it could have been so much more.
Processing - Previously mentioned NyARToolkit is great with Processing from a PC - example usage, which works perfectly for the 'here's a pattern, here's an object, just render it there' functionality, but then it all breaks down for Android - GStreamer for Android is at a very very early hacky stage, and in general video functionality seems to be a rather low priority for the Android Processing project - right now import processing.video.*; just fails.
layar, wikitude etc, they all seem to focus more on interactivity, location and whatnot, which I absolutely don't need, and are somehow missing this basic usage.
Where am I going wrong? I would be happy to code some part of the video capture/detection/rendering, I don't need a drag-and-drop library, but the sample code from AndAR just fills me with dread
I suggest to take a look at the Vuforia SDK (formerly QCAR) by Qualcomm plus jPCT-AE as 3D-Engine. They both work very well together, no pure OpenGL needed. However you need some C/C++ knowledge, since Vuforia relies to the NDK to some degree.
It basically boils to to get the marker pose from Vuforia via a simple JNI-function (the SDK contains fully functional and extensive sample code) and use that to place the 3D-objects with jPCT (the easiest way is to set the pose as the rotation matrix of the object, which is a bit hacky, but produces quick results).
jPCT-AE supports 3D-model loading for some common formats. The API docs are good, but you may need to consult the forums for sample code.