Due to the currently surging interest in AR Sandbox installations, I am posting complete installation instructions, starting from a blank desktop PC with an Nvidia GeForce graphics card. Due to increasing weirdness in recent versions of Mac OS X (starting with 10.7), I can no longer recommend Mac computers and Mac OS X to drive AR Sandbox installations.
You can also watch a full walk-through video of steps 1-5.
Install the current version of 64-bit Linux Mint with MATE desktop on a blank desktop computer. This needs to be a real computer; the AR Sandbox does not work from inside a virtual machine.
Install vendor-supplied drivers for the Nvidia graphics card. Open the Control Center, select “Driver Manager,” wait for the panel to show up and the list of available drivers to be populated, and then select the recommended Nvidia binary driver and press “Apply Changes.” Then wait until the change is complete (might take a while), and reboot your computer.
Assign a keyboard shortcut to switch windows into full-screen mode. Open the Control Center, go to “Keyboard Shortcuts” (all the way down), find the “Window Management” subsection, and then the “Toggle fullscreen mode” entry. Click on the entry, and assign a new shortcut, for example Ctrl+Alt+F.
Open a terminal window and enter precisely the following commands (if in doubt, cut & paste directly from this web page, one line at a time). ~ is shorthand for the user’s home directory:
cd ~
wget http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Vrui/Build-Ubuntu.sh
bash Build-Ubuntu.sh
The script run in the last command will ask you for your user’s password to install prerequisite libraries, and then build the Vrui VR toolkit. That will take a little while and produce lots of output, and at the end you’ll be greeted by a spinning globe in a window. Close that window and go back to the same terminal as before:
cd ~/src
wget http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Kinect/Kinect-2.8-002.tar.gz
tar xfz Kinect-2.8-002.tar.gz
cd Kinect-2.8-002
make
make install
make installudevrule
The last command will install a device rule that allows regular users access to the Kinect camera, and might require you to enter your user’s password again. To continue:
cd ~/src
wget http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/SARndbox/SARndbox-1.6.tar.gz
tar xfz SARndbox-1.6.tar.gz
cd SARndbox-1.6
make
… and that’s it. This will leave all support utilities and applications (RawKinectViewer, KinectViewer) in ~/Vrui-3.1/bin, and the AR Sandbox calibration utility and main application in ~/src/SARndbox-1.6/bin.
Plug in your first-generation Kinect device and download intrinsic calibration parameters directly from its firmware. In a terminal window, run:
~/Vrui-3.1/bin/KinectUtil getCalib 0
Align your camera so that its field of view covers the interior of your sandbox. Use RawKinectViewer to guide you during alignment. To start it, run in a terminal window:
cd ~/src/SARndbox-1.6
~/Vrui-3.1/bin/RawKinectViewer -compress 0
Calculate your sandbox’s base plane, by following the instructions in the AR Sandbox Calibration – Step 4 video, or this new video that shows all required calibration steps in one. You can use the already-running instance of RawKinectViewer.
Measure the 3D extents of the sand surface. In the newly-released Kinect-2.8-002 package, this can be done inside RawKinectViewer as well by following the instructions in this video, starting at 4:10. Make sure to measure the box corners in the order lower-left, lower-right, upper-left, upper-right.
Align your projector such that its image fills the interior of your sandbox. You can use the calibration grid drawn by Vrui’s XBackground utility as a guide. In a terminal:
~/Vrui-3.1/bin/XBackground
After the window showing the calibration grid appears, press the “f” key to toggle it into full-screen mode. Ensure that the window really covers the entire screen, i.e., that there are no title bar, desktop panel, or other decorations left.
Press Esc to close XBackground’s window when you’re done.
Calibrate the Kinect camera and the projector with respect to each other by running the CalibrateProjector utility:
cd ~/src/SARndbox-1.6
./bin/CalibrateProjector -s
where are the width and height of your projector’s image in pixels. For example, for an XGA projector like the recommended BenQ, the command would be:
./bin/CalibrateProjector -s 1024 768
Very important: switch CalibrateProjector’s window to full-screen mode by pressing Win+f (Windows key plus “f” key) before proceeding. Then follow the instructions in this video, starting at 10:10.
Finally, run the main AR Sandbox application:
cd ~/src/SARndbox-1.6
./bin/SARndbox -uhm -fpv