Windows Phone is now the latest addition to Wikitude’s existing platform portfolio including Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Symbian. Using the Windows Phone Metro UI, Wikitude has been customized to enable the panorama user interface, which differentiates the experience on this platform. Beside this special navigation flow, Wikitude provides what you would expect, which is of course the ability to explore your surroundings in Augmented Reality (AR).

“Windows Phone is clearly on the rise as a platform for the years to come, which is why we feel confident about growing our user base through the Nokia and Windows Phone ecosystem” says Andy Gstoll, CMO Wikitude.

The WP version also provides category containers such as Pubs, Accommodations, Cafes, Attractions and Restaurants on the homescreen, offers a search functionality and in addition to the AR view the ability to see Places in map or list view.

“With the Wikitude World Browser, we’re bringing Wikitude’s leadership in Augmented Reality (AR) to our customers, offering a world-class AR platform integrated with the Nokia Lumia experience. It’s been great to work with Wikitude’s highly innovative team.” commented Kunal Sachdeva, Senior Manager, Global Partnerships and Applications Development, Nokia.

Wikitude World Browser for Windows Phone features more than 2,500 AR content experiences called content ‘Worlds’. These aggregated content datasets add up to more than 150 million points of interest such as sights, restaurants, mobile coupons, cafes and WiFi hotspots around the globe. There is no need to be overwhelmed by this high quantity of content as Wikitude allows you to customize your home screen according to your lifestyle and preferences, so you can find the things you are interested in quickly.

Check out the video below to see the IDEOS X3 handset.

Confirming the news, Mr. Anand Narang, Marketing Director at Huawei Devices said, “We are extremely pleased to partner with Wikitude for this innovative application. The Wikitude World Browser will allow our users to discover what’s around them in a completely new manner. Huawei who is known for its innovation always aims to provide the best combination of good design and superb user experience to its mobile users. We look forward for a positive response from our valuable users for the newly launched smartphones Sonic and IDEOS X3 which has many other exciting applications like Wikitude loaded in it.”

Wikitude features more than 2,000 AR content experiences. These aggregated content datasets add up to more than 150 million points of interest (POIs) like sights, restaurants, mobile coupons, coffee shops and WiFi hotspots around the globe. Wikitude also allows the users to customize the home screen according to individual’s lifestyle and preferences. Wikitude currently offers more than 2 million POIs in India. Some of the content in India includes: Twitter (geo referenced tweets), Flickr, Instagram, Panoramio and Youtube (geo referenced pictures and videos), Foursquare Venues, Google Local, Wikipedia articles, hotels.com, booking.com and more.

“It is absolutely phenomenal that we were able to engage with Huawei on optimizing Wikitude for a smartphone with cloud services” said Andy Gstoll, Wikitude’s CMO. “Huawei’s lifestyle oriented devices in combination with Wikitude make Augmented Reality possible without any compromises.” He further added, “due to Huawei’s very competitively priced handsets, Augmented Reality is now available to a much wider audience than ever before.”

Each year Augmented Planet asks the Augmented Reality (AR) community to vote for their favourite Augmented Reality experiences. Entered into the categories of Best Augmented Reality Browser and Best Augmented Reality Developer Platform or Tool Wikitude came away with a trophy in each hand!

“Winning the Best Augmented Reality Browser award for a record third year in a row is a great achievement. We were even more delighted to hear that we had also won the Best Augmented Reality Developer Platform or Tool as this proves that our enabling platform approach is spot on. This is an outstanding accomplishment and we would like to thank all Wikitude users and developers for their support” said Wikitude CEO Martin Herdina, when he heard the great news.

Wikitude was honored with even more awards only a few weeks back when Andy Gstoll, our CMO, hopped on a plane to Alicante, Spain, for the BlackBerry Alliance Summit 2011. This is an annual event that brings together BlackBerry with its Alliance Program partners. The highlight of the event was the BlackBerry Innovation Awards 2011 for which Wikitude was nominated in the category ‘Going Social – Best BBM Connected App’. “Finding out that we were chosen as the winners in such a prestigious group of contenders was simply phenomenal. We are very proud to be the first to have taken instant messaging into Augmented Reality. A huge congratulations goes out to our team in Salzburg for this fantastic achievement”, said Andy.

We would like to thank all Wikitude users and fans for your support and we hope that you continue to enjoy using Wikitude in 2012! We wish you all a very happy Christmas and a great New Year!

NEW!

Now possible: Create your very own AR World!

With the new Wikitude myWorld feature (currently in beta) you can create your very own Augmented Reality World. The “Create Place” tool allows you to mark the location of your favorite Mexican restaurant or any other location that is special to you, perhaps a meeting point, your favorite store or the amazing hotel you discovered in Italy last summer. Your World can be shared with your friends on Facebook, meaning you see their favorite Places, and they see yours. Download now for Android and iOS. Also check out Wikitude myWorld on facebook. Try it now!

Wikitude myWorld is still in experimental beta mode and we would love to hear your feedback, bug reports and suggestions. Please email us to info[at]wikitude.com and let us know what you think!

Your Wikitude Team

As part of BlackBerry® Dev Con Asia taking place in Singapore this year, Wikitude has announced additional support for smartphones running on the BlackBerry® 6 operating system (OS). With Wikitude being preinstalled on all new smartphones running the BlackBerry 7 OS, bringing Wikitude to smartphones running BlackBerry 6 will help answer considerable demand expressed by users who want to experience Wikitude’s extensive content offering including more than 2,000 content Worlds consisting of approx. 150 million places around the globe. Users of the popular BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700, 9780,9788 and BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 smartphones can download Wikitude on BlackBerry® App World™ starting today.

Although smartphones running BlackBerry OS 6 do not support the Augmented Reality view, which requires specific hardware features available in BlackBerry 7 based smartphones, the Wikitude app does fully integrate with BBM™ enabling users to find their BBM friends on a map and to communicate with one another based on their location. Users opting to allow their whereabouts to be displayed can even make new friends.

After being crowned “The Most Addictive Social App Using the BBM Social Platform” at BlackBerry DevCon Americas in October, Wikitude most recently won the BlackBerry® EMEA Innovation Award for “Best BBM Connected App”, awarded in Alicante 1st December. “Extending the Wikitude platform to millions of BlackBerry 6 smartphone users will make the BBM experience richer than ever before. We are extremely happy to finally bring this version of Wikitude to even more BlackBerry smartphone users,” says Martin Herdina, Wikitude’s CEO.

Alec Saunders, VP Developer Relations, Research In Motion, said: “We’re delighted that Wikitude has integrated BBM support within their app. Integration with BBM can allow much greater viral discovery for apps, as well as enrich and transform the user experience with important social elements.”

Wolfgang explained to the guys at Creating Apps that ARchitect is a brand new developer kit for an open, flexible and powerful tool for creating Augmented Reality content by using common web technologies and that there is lots of exciting things developers can do with it. With ARchitect, developers can create Worlds based on standards and technology trusted by billions of websites like HTML, CSS and JavaScript and the advanced features open unlimited possibilities with interaction, animations and media playback.

So, if you enjoy discovering the world around you with Wikitude and want to create amazing Augmented Reality Worlds that blow your mind, then let us introduce you to Wolfgang Damm, Wikitude’s Chief ARchitect to find out about the ARchitect Beta from Wikitude!

Interested in being an ARchitect Developer? All you have to do is register with us and download the ARchitect Developer Kit (ADK) which is filled with information and specifications which will help them on their way to creating their very own AR experience.

Find out more and sign up here!

We are thrilled to be nominated, so again we are calling on YOU our Wikitude fans, supporters, AR enthusiats, developers, partners, aunts and uncles to vote for us! This award is purely dedicated to recognising the world of Augmented Reality and for us, the only one that really matters!

Voting is easy, go here to vote for Wikitude, it only takes a minute – really!!

Thank you from the entire Wikitude Team!!!!!!!

With the P’9981 smartphone the premium brand introduced a technology packed luxury accessory to the market. Serving the upscale clientel, this unique piece of eye candy sets itself apart from mainstream devices. Beneath the solid one piece aluminum shell with leather-covered back, the P’9981 is equipped with BlackBerry’s 7 Operating System on the inside, which integrates all the sensors and high performance chips needed to run Wikitude’s sophisticated Augmented Reality (AR) software.

Wikitude has been customized to work seemlessly with the Porsche Design user interface. Taking advantage of the BlackBerry platform, P9981 owners will also be able to experience BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) in AR allowing them to find their BBM friends and other BBM users around them – a great way to interact and meet other Porsche Design enthusiasts.

View the official BlackBerry Porche Design P’9981 video below.

With Wikitude you can explore more than 150 million places around the world including restaurants, tourist sights, clubs and much more. In addition to more than 2,000 content providers or content “worlds”, as they are known in Wikitude lingo. You can also engage the “Porsche Design Store World” to locate points of sale for Porsche Design merchandise around you. But that’s not all, P’9981 owners are able to create their own places by using a simple map based tool available on www.P9981.me . So if you have found a special fine dining restaurant that you think your fellow Porsche Design smartphone owners should know about, just go to the web and create this place with a few clicks. Seconds later, it will be available to the P9981 device community in Wikitude’s augmented reality.

“It has been an exciting journey working with Porsche Design to reinvent Wikitude for this very unique device” explained Andy Gstoll, Wikitude’s CMO, “We were infected by the their true passion for design from day one.”

Read the official Porche press release here.

Wikitude’s CEO Martin Herdina presented the integration of BBM into Augmented Reality with RIM’s very own Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis

The BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco is the annual platform for BlackBerry’s latest innovations. As one of RIM’s strategic developer partners, this was an event we could not miss out on. Both Martin and Nic made their way across the Atlantic to be part of this exciting event in the heart of Silicon Valley.

The show kicked off yesterday with a keynote presentation from Mike Lazaridis, RIM’s co-CEO announcing BBX, BlackBerry’s all new Operating System combining the legacy BlackBerry OS with QNX, RIM’s recent technology acquisition. As part of the technical Keynote, the sweet marriage between Wikitude and BlackBerry Messenger was presented to thousands of viewers both locally present and around the world watching the live webcast.

To see Martin on the big stage, click the image below for the video and scroll forward to 101:30 mins.

Wikitude’s participation didn’t end there as we were present with a booth on the developer floor to demonstrate the best that Wikitude on BlackBerry has to offer. Wikitude also participated in the press tour where we showed journalists how Wikitude can shine, from discovering surroundings to using BlackBerry Messenger to contact friends, all in the immersive Augmented Reality view. The interest was high and Martin and Nic relished the enthusiasm and excitement for Wikitude that came from the stand visitors.

Martin was also interviewed by the Inside Blackberry Developer Blog where he went through the use cases of Wikitude as well as how we developed Wikitude for BlackBerry.

A further highlight of our participation is yet to come as today, Wednesday 19th October, Martin Herdina will take part in a panel discussion on how to provide app users with the best possible experience. With members of the RIM Business Development Team and other community experts, Martin will discuss consumer apps, the mobile marketplace and shared insights on app development, deployment and commercialization.

Martin’s first impressions of the event were enthusiastic, “demonstrating Wikitude to a full conference hall during the Keynote was such an amazing experience and it was a real honor to share Wikitude with this large audience. The event was buzzing with developers and it was great to see the passion that is out there for Wikitude on BlackBerry”.

This has already proved itself to be a great event and Wikitude looks forward to the next BlackBerry DevCons coming up soon. Meet Wikitude at the BlackBerry DevCon in Asia, Bangkok on 7-8 Dec 2011 or in Europe, Amsterdam on 7-8 Feb 2012. We look forward to seeing you there!

iOS 6.3 comes with a brand new design and exisiting users will be able to see the changes straight away. Wikitude has a new look and feel to it with refreshed icons, new layout, updated colours and high resolution images.

But we at Wikitude don’t just make cosmetic changes. After downloading Wikitude iOS 6.3 you will find a spanking new home screen with category containers holding points of interest across all worlds / content providers. Check out the Restaurant category container for example, this lists all the restaurants around you presenting results form different providers.
We’ve also added containers for pubs, cafes, events and WiFi hotspots so that you can find out what is around you quicker.

With Smart Search, Wikitude iOS 6.3 is now even more user-friendly. Start typing your search term and Wikitude will show you search suggestions as well as Worlds and Points of Interest that match your search as you are typing – very cool.

Other brand new features include, new filters in the All Worlds functions, Points of Interest now show elevation, which proves very handy if you live in mountainous regions like us in Austria. You will also find a performance improved camera view with a radar visualized on the compass.

All in all, Wikitude iOS 6.3 is a whole new browsing experience redesigned and improved enabling you to explore your surroundings in a smarter, more exciting way.

New to Wikitude? Have no fear, iOS 6.3 includes some first time intro slides which give you a quick tour on how to to discover your surroundings with Wikitude.
Download now in the App Store and check it out!

Go to our Flickr page for more images of the all new Wikitude iOS 6.3.