Layar is an Augmented Reality application for the iPhone and Android that allows you to superimpose information onto your phones camera view based on your GPS position and internal compass.

The first Layar simply displays Airsoft Retailers and Skirmish sites near you (You can adjust the distance from 10m to 200Km). This is great for a number of reasons;

1. General curiosity
2. Actually tracking down where the site is once your Sat Nav announces you’ve arrived despite just being at the entrance of a forest
3. A preview of Airbana’s interactive Layar that is coming soon

Search the App Store and the App Market for the Layar application and then once installed search for Airsoft.

Airbana’s next Layar is designed for use in Capture the Flag style missions in large outdoor environments (GPS doesn’t really work inside) where you will be able to see where (and how far away) your objectives are, read the brief and receive up to the minute data about the status of the objectives and if your team members also have an Android or iPhone where they are too!

As with all of Airbana’s other projects this is free to use for everyone.

Check out the latest podcast (and others) here: http://www.airsoftology.com/2010/02/airsoftology28/

Airsoftology Talk – Episode #28: “Muffin Top” from Airsoftology on Vimeo.

Some of the code from this new application has made it ‘back’ into the “Airsoft Events Info” application on the Android App Market.

Due to various compatibility issues the original Android application has been unpublished in favour of this newer version.

The blurb on the Android market is;
The latest version of Airbana’s Airsoft Events info app.
Find Skirmish events happening in the next week, fortnight or even months in advance.
Add new Events or Edit an Event if something is incorrect.
Search for specific Events and filter out sites you aren’t interested in.

There is the possibility that an iPhone version of this application may also backport down from the full application.

Here’s a lock screen image as well;

This version includes new features such as;

• Search functionality
• An Improved List view
• Improved database design
• Aggregation of Airsoft news from Arnies, PopularAirsoft.com, Twitter and other Airbana projects
• Improved client side Javascript
• Improved Event date addition process
• Adding sites now features geo-coding (no more having to find the GPS coordinates yourself)

There is also a new look and feel to the site which I hope you will all enjoy.

Airbana is supporting their fundraising efforts with an online version that can be found at www.AirsoftCalendar.info and I’ve redirected Airbana’s Advertising stream from Facebook and Google to promote their calendar.

Treat yourselves to something to liven up that boring ol’ wall and help promote the participation of woman in the sport!

The RFID tracker is something I’ve been working on for some time now, originally developed as a standalone series of weather proof detection pods that recorded the presence of nearby players in contended hotspots such as bunkers and other such objectives. Depending on the HSDPA coverage the pods could report their statistics back to the Airbana webservers or their data could be pulled off at the end of the day.

With HSDPA coverage the site organisers can see which team had control of an area and in theory with enough pod’s deployed see who was where. In offline mode the data is pulled off and parsed by the offline parser where it works out who was where at what times and can display the information as required allowing the organisers to categorically declare the results without having to have had a marshal at that particular location at all times throughout the day.

Unfortunately making the units lightweight, power grid independent, rugged and weather proof for use in woodland sites proved to be exceedingly expensive (each pod was working out to be around £600) so development paused for a while.

With the arrival First and Only’s ‘The Mall‘ skirmish site I was free to rely on mains power and didn’t have to worry about rain / snow etc. This brought the units down to around £300(ish) which is far more affordable (Airbana is a non-profit project I work on in my spare time!). The other benefit is that I can utilise a projector to give the players a 30 foot screen for feedback which will hopefully further improve the player experience.

The Technology

The RFID trackers are small (5cm x 4cm x 1cm boxes) active RFID transponders that the player carries around with them and as soon as they are within range of the detector (1 – 4 metres) the detector will start tallying up the scores. Each tracker is roughly £30.

If conflicting tags are detected then the scoring pauses until one team is defeated! As one teams score increases the other team’s decreases.

The detector pod comprises of a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom nano-itx motherboard, solid state disk for the operating system, 1Gb DDR RAM, the RFID detection unit (serial), power converter (AC to DC or DC to DC), LED diagnostic array and the steel shell – once it’s had a paint job I’ll put up some pictures.

There are two version of the Tracker software, for headless pod’s that simply record and relay the information the Tracker software is written in plain C and runs on a custom version of Linux based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5. The pod with a projector to provide feedback to users is written in C# and runs on Windows Embedded.

The Airbana Tracker software can be skinned to suit the theme of the day and in the case of the Terminator Salvation event the projected image looks like this;

When both teams are in range of the tracker (so we can assume a firefight is going on) then the screen changes to display this;

Future Plans

If the Tracker is well received by the players at the event then I will continue to work on the project adding features such as chained devices so a team has to hold multiple points in order for their score to increase, mobile handsets and much more.

In theory with enough pods and with all players carrying a tag then a Site Operator would be able to track where each and every player is and even play back their movements from the days event!

I would like to revisit the Woodland devices at some point but I need to do more work on the power sources.

Version 4.5 cleans up some minor bugs, has added some XML fields (Type, Region) to existing functions as well as adding the GetSitesBasicByType function.

The updated documentation is available here and the API itself (including offline documentation and examples) can be download here.

There will most likely be another release before December to help support the Airbana Android / Windows Mobile / IPhone (maybe) apps that are being developed.

If there is any functionality you’d like to see added to the API (such as JSON return objects etc) then please let me know.

Featuring the ability to govern the Regions displayed (World, UK, EU, USA, Asia), Site types (Skirmish or Retailer) and even all the way to Longitude, Latitude and Zoom levels Airbana truly is the most advanced Airsoft Map available.

All you need to do is visit http://embeddable.airbana.net/ enter the Website you’ll be publishing the map within, your email address and if you have any some suggestions drop those in too, answer the Recaptcha test and you’re done!

If everything works out OK you’ll instantly receive your Embeddable Key and some example code.

Simply paste the example code into one of your Webpages and you’re done!

If you have any suggestions or need some help integrating it with your website drop me an email: Gareth@Airbana.net

In less that 24 hours I’ll be releasing a version of the Airbana Airsoft Map that anyone can embed into ANY website! Full Airbana feature set, complete customisability for Region, Types, co-ordinates and zoom levels.

In co-ordination with the folks at Google I’m pleased to present the Airbana Embeddable Airsoft Map:

Thanks go out to Xlizer for flagging up one of the bugs.

As always please drop me an email at Gareth@Airbana.net or tweet @Airbana with any bug reports or feature suggestions.