I’m finishing the final chapter of my book this afternoon. 

Yeah, not sure if this was just Halloween spirit or what… the last chapter is a cocos2D / Augmented Reality game called Attack of the Alien Jack-o-lanterns. I’m also not sure why they are alien… but, they came from somewhere to take over our human bodies. 

In this chapter, we create a basic cocos2D game where pumpkins are taking over our faces. Random people in the camera view have a pumpkin (some people aren’t affected) taking over their head… like you see here: 

Doesn’t that kind of make you want to shoot the pumpkin?…well, good thing. When you tap the pumpkins they explode. Not sure if there’s any business value here… but, gaming was one of the topics we had to cover in the text.

I’ll see if I can clean this up enough to get it on iTunes around Halloween. 

I’m working on the final edits for my upcoming Professional iOS 5 Augmented Reality book. I posted a few screenshots from the facial recognition tutorial chapter already. I got the kids help with that chapter. I covered two other approaches to facial recognition in the book as well, with some help from Elvis. 

Chapter 12 covers three approaches to facial recognition from iOS applications with sample code. I discuss OpenCV, the more traditional approach as well as a more web friendly REST API from face.com. Lastly, we discuss the new CIDetector classes that shipped with iOS 5. 

With some help from the moriarty library, we measured the performance of the different approaches. CIDetector came out on top for native analytics. Outperforming OpenCV and face.com. Of course, face.com also includes a full round trip to a REST API. The fact that it even comes close to the performance of a full native API is impressive on its own. 

So, my book (shipping in November) is available to order now on Amazon. There are some great examples of how to build Augmented Reality applications on iOS.

For example, I walk you through:

• Facebook Places Augmented Reality application
• Setting up Augmented Reality for cocos2D and causing touch explosions on the screen
• First person shooter (shoot some aliens) Augmented Reality application
• Marker based Augmented Reality (projecting a 3D object based on a recognized object)
• A Real-time facial recognition AR app that analyzes the moods of people in sight

The code is available on github (although it’s not all public yet) and Apress.com. If you’re interested in learning how to build AR apps on iOS, please consider this reference. I’ll start posting the suplemental materials and tutorials that aren’t included in the press edition to the blog soon.