Since mid last year, immowelt.de has been displaying regional real estate offers in the Wikitude World browser and we were naturally delighted that they decided to use our Androis SDK to enrich their application. The press release distributed by Immowelt.de describes how the Augmented Reality is ideal for the Android App. Through the well-developed Wikitude technology, relevant real-estate offers can be found for the user in their vicinity by means of live pictures from the Smartphone camera. Straight away, users are able to see exactly where a house has apartments for rent. The integration of AR in this latest version of the Android-App connects the considerable search capabilities of the App wth the awe-inspiring Augmented Reality view.

Find more information about Wikitude SDK here!

If you answered these questions with “Yes,” you definitely should read this blog post. If not, read it anyhow and maybe it will inspire the best idea of your life.

Nearly six months ago we published our API for the Android platform. Some really great apps, like the Location Scout (thx Jeff), were developed since then using our API as simple way to enhance the experience for their users.

Now we want to make iPhone developers happy and announce that our iPhone API is ready for all of you to use! The concept is the same as with the Android version: it’s simple and easy to use, and you don’t have to worry about the AR view, because it is part of the API itself.

When we finished the API, we thought about cool ways to showcase the potential of the API. We came up with a lot of ideas, but we are sure your imagination for use cases will go way beyond what we came up with.

Thx to Lester from Augmented Planet and my colleagues, who are all huge soccer fans, we created a simple demo application which shows all FIFA World Cup 2010 soccer stadiums in South Africa. After creating this app, I am an expert in all the matches and where they will be played, because it was my task to prepare all the info for implementation.

As I mentioned earlier, the integration of the API is fairly easy. It took me about half an hour to develop the application and half an hour to organize the data which I wanted to display. In our showcase we wanted to show a list of matches for each stadium along with a thumbnail. But if you have a shop finder application, you could just as easily use it to display the opening hours or the address. The list of possibilities goes on and on. And if you already have the points you want to display and know which information you want to show in the AR view, you will be surprised how quickly you will see your points in your augmented reality view.

Once you have registered and downloaded the API package from our developer webpage. There are 4 basic steps to creating your own AR view:

• Add the WikitudeAPI-Folder containing the Static Library, Public Headers and Resources to your iPhone-Project in Xcode.
• Add additional frameworks to your project and make changes to the linker flags (details are found in the API documentation)
• Within your custom application, create a new WikitudeARViewController with your registration data – this ViewController returns the camera view.
• Add your data as POI array and start the view

If you think this can’t be that easy – try it, and you will see that it really is! You will also find more features to customize your AR view and POIs:
Each POI can have its own action which can be defined for the action button (displayed in the POI bubble). So be creative! I decided it would be nice to hear a horn-sound, so I would really be in the soccer mood.
Customizable menu buttons: This allows for further individualization of your AR view. Open a new view, show special information to a POI, etc.

If you are interested now in what the soccer stadium application looks like, below is a short video. Try it out and you will see that I have not lied when I said it was easy!

Last but not least, thx to my colleagues I will probably become a soccer fan too, because I really had fun creating this app.

If you have questions or suggestions regarding the API, you’re more than welcome to contact me.

Greetings,
Nicola

A complete tutorial and the SDK itself can be downloaded from here.

A wonderful Showcase is “Location Scout” by Jeff Gilfelt

Of course we have been curious about Jeff’s experience with the Wikitude SDK:

Jeff, how did you develop your AR camera-view? Was it difficult?
With the Wikitude SDK I don’t have to deal with any of the complexities of device positioning, orientation or camera UI. Instead I just focus on providing the geo data and let Wikitude take care of the rest. I would say most existing geo applications on Android can become AR enabled using the Wikitude SDK with just one or two hours of development and testing.

What do you like about the Wikitude SDK?
While there are alternatives available that allow you to display you own data as “Overlays” within Wikitude and other AR browsers, what I really like about the Wikitude SDK solution is that it provides true on-device integration that adds real value to your own app. The intent mechanism that facilitates inter-application communication is one of
Android’s most unique and powerful features. It is great to see Wikitude embracing this within their SDK.

What about the new features of Wikitude 4 that have just been released?
The great thing about the API is that it also enables your application to automatically leverage the continual improvements to Wikitude itself. When the new camera view enhancements were delivered in Wikitude 4, those same enhancements appeared automatically in Location
Scout.

Thanks for the interview!

About Location Scout

Location Scout is a mobile application that helps you discover filming locations for thousands of movies via information compiled by the Internet Movie Database. Location Scout has had over 16000 downloads from the Android Market. In December 2009, Location Scout was selected as one of T-Mobile USA’s “top picks” in their Android market channel and was even part of a special promotional event that took place during the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Congratulations on this big success!

Content (“Worlds”) in Wikitude

The new version of Wikitude (out now for Android, iPhone coming soon), Wikitude is able to handle arbitrary geo-referenced content sources. Companies can use Wikitude itself to display the content with customized icons in the Augmented Reality camera view. This is completely free of charge.

The content can be integrated via a HTTP-Interface (Mobilizy will connect to this search-interface, provided by the company; the content can reside on any server, not necessarily on the Wikitude server) KML or ARML file (the files can be uploaded via a web interface, or the URL to a KML/ARML file can be registered to be crawled continuously; in either case, the content will be stored on the Wikitude server)
The main advantage of this option is that Wikitude already has a broad user base, so the content will be available to hundreds of thousands of users. Also, as Wikitude supports various platforms (currently Android, iPhone, Symbian), content will automatically be available on all platforms Wikitude supports, without any costs to the company.

Learn more about how to add your Overlay

Wikitude API

Mobilizy offers an API where developers can easily build their own AR application without reinventing the AR-wheel. The AR code itself is encapsulated in the API, the only thing the developer needs to do is adding the geo-referenced data (Points of Interest) to the API.

A complete tutorial and the API itself can be downloaded from www.wikitude.org/developers.

The API is currently available for Android and iPhone.

White Label Solution

This is the most customizable and extensive option. Mobilizy re-uses the Wikitude core functionality to build an entirely new application for the company. Nearly everything is customizable (content, splash screen, appearance of camera/map/list screen, enabling/disabling of Wikitude-features etc.), Mobilizy will charge the development costs per man day (for each platform requested), based on the specification of the application developed by the company and Mobilizy.
Examples of White Label Solutions include the Lonely Planet Compass, the IBM Seer and the Red Bull Hotspot Viewer.

If you are interested in a White Label Solution please do not hesitate to contact us via info (at) mobilizy.com

Open Source – AR Kit at http://www.iphonear.org

Developed by Chris Haseman, Zac White, Charles Ruelle, Arshad Tayyeb, Sid Gabriel Hubbard.

The AR Kit is an open source UI library for displaying location based data in spherical coordinate systems mirroring UI Kit on the phone. A list of CLLocation objects can be submitted and our library will handle drawing of the locations on screen.

The most recent high-level media exposure we have received has been from Venture Beat:

Nicholas Tollervey took data from GeoBeagle, a free, open-source application for Google’s Android platform and marked it up in the Wikitude browser. Wikitude is an augmented reality browser from Austrian company Mobilizy.

SOURCE: Augmented reality meets scavenger hunt with GeoBeagle, Wikitude | VentureBeat

GeoBeagle

WIKITUDE.org

SOURCE: Wikitude連携アプリ開発