CuriousMe is an augmented reality application developed by Xhensila Doda and Davide Abati as midterm project for MuMet. It is basically composed of two building blocks:

• a web server, where the user can couple target images with YouTube videos, and store the combination;
• an Android application, that can recognize such target images once acquired by the device camera, and play the corresponding video in overlap. Actually, this also relies on the Vuforia SDK and Vuforia Web Services to work, but everything will be clear in a minute!

By now, you can watch a fancy video of CuriousMe.

The whole architecture is explained by this image:

1 - User just publishes a new image/video combination on the web application, and the information gets forwarded to the Vuforia Cloud, as an image with textual metadata (the video url);

2 - The Vuforia SDK living in the Android Application queries the cloud web services about the presence of a target image in the acquired frame;

3 - If a target is present, its metadata are sent to the mobile application, containing the video URL;

4 - The mobile application opens a connection to the CuriousMe server, that acts as a proxy to YouTube (this is necessary because Android only supports HLS streams, so a conversion is needed);

5 - The video reaches the mobile phone, and is rendered upon the target image within the acquired frame.

Unfortunately, the web application is not available yet :(... but we're working on its release! Anyway, you can still try the mobile application by manually uploading data in the Vuforia Cloud. Here's how it works:

• Create a Vuforia developer account here.
• In your Target Manager, create a cloud database and load your first target image, also providing a text file as metadata, containing the HLS url of the stream you want to couple;
• Checkout this repository in a local folder, and open it with Android Studio (integration with different IDEs is possible, but definitely NOT recommended);
• In your Vuforia Developer Portal, find out your client access keys for your database, and put them in app/src/main/java/com/mumet/abatidoda/curiousme/VideoPlayback/app/VideoPlayback/VideoPlayback.java, lines 112-113:

private static final String kAccessKey = "INSERT ACCESS KEY HERE";
private static final String kSecretKey = "INSERT SECRET KEY HERE";

• Install the application on a device, open it and try to frame your target! :)