fritzvd

Another consideration is if using Augmented Reality (AR) how to implement it and what method of going about it.

ARToolkit has different spin-offs that look quite interesting. One of my favourites are FLARToolkit and possibly SLARToolkit. The flash toolkit. But then I am not very proficient in Flash and ActionScript. Also I tend to avoid Flash as much as possible as well as writing stuff in C#. But the office I work in makes it easier to use C# then any other binding. Also there is a C# binding of OGRE which is quite well developed. OGRE is an opensource 3d gaming engine Which made me think: HTML5. Is there a solution for that?

Also OSGARToolkit looks interesting. It uses a well developed opensource C++ based 3d graphics toolkit OpenSceneGraph. Which itself has a GIS project going as well. (osggis and osgearth). A quite detailed and beautiful Flight Simulator – FlightGear – is also based on OSG. An interesting project based on the OSG library is Vizard. A library in Python (yey!) to create Virtual Environments. The only major drawback is that it costs a fortune.

For some cool examples of FLARToolkit: rawkes.com.

The most viable of options seems to be the OSGARToolkit. It is free and above all it has quite good thorough documentation. To get started and to continue the work a bit. Just need to learn a bit of C++ (oh lord) and 3D modeling. This might be a long insomniac season.