Author: Paula_Admin

Categories
Digital agencies

Roomle makes furniture shopping so much more fun

Let’s face it – despite the bright colors, clever Swedish design, and exceedingly happy salespeople, few of us would actually choose to spend their entire Saturday at IKEA. It’s a chore! But good thing for you – we now practically live in Back to the Future, and augmented reality is, in this case, going to get you to spend less time on life administration by streamlining the time you spend planning, designing, and purchasing furniture for your home.

It’s not only one of the best use cases of AR, it’s also one of the most obvious: planning and designing interior spaces using easy-to-understand visuals – while you stand in the space you’re planning. Of course, IKEA already tried it back in 2013 – but the technology has advanced significantly. Now start-up app Roomle is making the process even easier – using Wikitude’s SLAM 3D tracking.

Check out the short demo below:

The benefits are clear, for everyone involved: less hassle, less travel, quicker and more intuitive understanding of how a space will look and feel. Customers love it because it makes their lives easier; retailers love it because it means more sales, and less overhead on showrooms and stores. And those are just the big benefits – here’s a few more:

  • Real-time supply with up-to-date and individually relevant product information
  • Visualization of residential environments and interior architecture
  • Interactive interface creates strong brand connection
  • The personalization factor is enhanced by the unique usability
  • Simpler presentation of complex products
  • Products ‘stick’ in the consumer’s memory and are recognized more quickly

So what makes Roomle the AR room design app of the future? The stuff behind the scenes. It’s got an incredibly simple user interface – users can jump on the app and start designing rooms and spaces intuitively. In the home, they can simply select a product from the catalogue, and use their phone’s camera to see it in live space. Key here is our SLAM 3D markerless tracking tech – without ‘seeing’ the room, the app wouldn’t be able to place the object in the room to see.

Using Roomle is this easy

Screen shot of roomle app, with 3D white chair overlayed on floor
Roomle is even more impressive in the hands of a trained professional (that’s a nice way of saying ‘salesperson!’). It turns an iPad into a custom furniture showroom. Sales staff can pick furniture from the brand catalog, configure it according to the customer´s preferences and demonstrate the result in convincing 3-D or augmented reality views, live in every room. See the longer explanation about how Roomle works, here.

So now that we’ve arrived at the future, what’s the future of the future? Good question – for one, we can imagine one-click ordering (á la Amazon) combined with the flat-packing genius of IKEA to facilitate home shopping even more – take a picture, pick your product, click ‘purchase’ and it shows up at your door one day later. What follows? Pre-fabbed house construction – calculate the price of a new floor or painting a room, or installing an addition to your home.

If you’ve been thinking about making some changes around the house, but the hassle of getting out the measuring tape, doing the research, and going shopping has been holding you back – wait no more, give Roomle a try!

Roomle is powered by Wikitude. Get started with the Wikitude SDK today!

Categories
Education

How Wikitude and Augmented Reality are helping the deaf communicate

We know that augmented reality can do some cool stuff – but you can imagine how good we felt when we heard about Markus Streibl, who used Wikitude tech to help deaf kids communicate better by using Augmented Reality flashcards.

After being granted a Wikitude academic license, Streibl, a Master’s student in Business Informatics in Graz, Austria, and working at Evolaris, used the Wikitude EDU SDK to develop an app that helped his wife, a school teacher at the Center for Inclusion and Special Education (ZIS), give children with hearing problems another tool for learning. AR-enabled flashcards help students form a strong connection between the item and the sign language gesture. There is also an added benefit – students can study and practice on their own.

deaf children using Augmented Reality to improve their reading skills in a classroom

It’s a mission with a good cause. “Literacy skills are key to helping people communicate and participate socially,” he says. “Impaired hearing represents a significant barrier to obtaining good literacy skills.” While other IT-based learning tools exist, none employ augmented reality to improve literacy, specifically.

The app was part of his Master’s thesis. he partnered with the ZIS to conduct a four-month trial on how an AR app, in conjunction with analog flashcards, helped deaf children learn to communicate and read. While the four-month trial is not quite sufficient to draw scientific conclusions, the information obtained indicates that improved learning success for reading skills can be achieved using an AR application, and flashcards. He speculates this might be triggered by increased motivation through the use of mobile devices as well as by the strong connection between the word and the image, plus and the possibility of a review of the student’s needs.
All in all, the project has been a success – and is a great reminder AR is going to change the world in ways we haven’t even realized yet.
Want to make great things happen with our technology? Check out our blog post on how to get started with our academic license.

Request EDU SDK
Categories
SDK releases

The future of AR creation is here – try the all-new Wikitude Studio Editor now.

AR content creator

Today Wikitude starts a new chapter launching the next generation of our AR content creator: our next version of Wikitude Studio, called Wikitude Studio Editor – currently in beta.
We introduced the world’s easiest AR creation tool back in 2013. Studio was phenomenal for its time! The old version of our tool was considered the most viable alternative to Metaio Creator, back then, the benchmark AR authoring and publishing tool – and one which is no longer available.
Since then, a lot has changed: new tools appeared in the market – and others have disappeared. AR experiences have become more sophisticated, and the need for customer engagement is now that much higher.
So as technology advances, so must the tools we use to create it! We’ve opened up public access to the next generation of our platform– the beta version of Wikitude Studio Editor. Our mission was to create an even more powerful tool that would allow anyone to build awesome AR experiences in just a few clicks.
160502_WT_Studio_Comparison_01_03
With the beta version you will be able to use all functionalities of Studio, including previewing and testing of AR projects. With the official release of the new Wikitude Studio, you’ll be able to export to both the Wikitude app and to your own apps.

Here’s everything you need to know about Wikitude Studio Editor!

Augmented Reality experiences – bring any print to life

Wikitude Studio Editor enables you to create interactive augmented reality experiences for magazines, newspapers, business cards, billboards, catalogues, or any 2-dimensional or planar surface. You can add the following digital content to your print:

  • 3D models
  • Videos and transparent videos
  • Images
  • Social media sharing buttons
  • Other buttons and labels

New features and navigation

“Quick, easy and fun” was our motto when developing the new Studio Editor. The list of what’s new on Studio is long – but here are the highlight features:

  • 3D model visualization – a reason to celebrate for our old Studio users: now you can see 3D-model silhouettes making it much easier to work with your augmentations.
  • New 3D space for targets – see your target and augmentations from different angles, freely move and adjust augmentation properties with the new Studio view.
  • Integration with Wikitude Cloud Recognition – Studio is now connected with our Cloud recognition service, which allows you to access your targets much faster online
  • Quick-load of projects via QR-code – preview and test your projects in just one scan, on the QR code reader of your choice
  • Monitor and report of projects – Use Google Analytics to follow your project performance and create precise report for your AR campaigns

What’s coming next?

  • Final version of Studio: our new Studio Editor is now available for free trial on the European set-up, so you can get started with our new AR content creation tool. The final version of Studio is planned for 2017. The old Studio remains with all its functionality and exporting properties until summer 2017.
  • Project exporting: this beta version currently doesn’t allow exporting of projects. This functionality will be available on the full release of the next Wikitude Studio.
  • Project migration: if you currently have projects in the old Studio, no need to worry! All projects remains untouched. Wikitude will provide a full migration guide once the new Studio is released.

Try it now!

We hope you enjoy working with Wikitude Studio Editor!

If you have any questions or feedback feel free to drop us a line on the Feedback section on the new Studio page. Spread the good news on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
The Wikitude team

Categories
News

The ARML 2.0 standard has been approved – now official!

Back in 2009 when we started with our proprietary ARML 1.0 file format, we had the vision that someday, an open data format for AR would emerge that was accepted and used industry wide. I’m pleased and proud to announce that this day has finally arrived!! ARML 2.0, the AR data format that the ARML 2.0 Standards Working Group (SWG) have been working on for the past 3 years has been adopted by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as an accepted and implemented industry standard.

The process and methodology we’ve executed over the past few years has been both exciting and challenging. When we proposed and started the ARML 2.0 SWG back in 2011, we were a group of five institutions that believed in the same vision of an augmented reality data standard.

After the SWG was initiated and all the necessary requirements to form a group were met, the SWG got towork. The members met regularly via telephone conferences, and face to face 3-4 times a year in locations across the globe, including Boulder, Colorado, Brussels, Belgium and Taichung, Taiwan. Just one short year later, the group had grown to more than 50 members by the time we were able to release a first draft of the specification to the public in November 2012.

The first version of the specification received some very good responses, and a couple of change requests. The integration of these changes kept us busy for another couple of months. By that time, ARML 2.0 received the status of a “Proposed OGC Standard”, meaning that the OGC proposes ARML to the community, but is waiting for implementations to make a decision on adopting the standard.

After the incorporation of the user feedback, the first implementations of the standard were released tothe world. We are currently aware of 4 live applications that are supporting ARML 2.0. The the three main AR Browser vendors, Layar, Metaio and Wikitude, teamed up to make the browsers’ interoperable utilizing ARML 2.0 as the common interchange format between them .

Additionally, SK Telecom, based in Seoul, Korea, utilized ARML 2.0 as the main content format for their brand new AR browser – and we are aware of several other implementations by multiple companies.

These implementations proved that ARML 2.0 can be implemented in several different applications, can serve multiple purposes and, according to the implementers, is easy to understand and to use practically . The latter was always a main focus topic for the SWG members.

After the implementations went live, we progressed out work to meet the final requirements for the adoption of the standard within the OGC. I did a final presentation of the standard in front of the entire OGC Plenary in Tokyo, Japan, and we opened a final Public Commenting Period for the community to submit final input. Following these procedures, the OGC Technical Committee conducted an electronic vote to adopt the ARML 2.0 standard as an official OGC standard. The vote was overwhelming, with a unanimous “YES”, and the OGC Planning Committee officially approved the vote!

Over the past two weeks, the OGC and myself have been preparing the release of the official documents and announcement of the adoption of the standard, which has just happened a few of hours ago.

It was a great and exciting journey, and I’m truly thankful that I was able to chair the ARML 2.0 SWG from the very beginning and help deliver an industry standard . I also want to thank the OGC for giving us support and useful insights throughout the entire process. It was worth every minute of our time and every key-press on our keyboards to create ARML 2.0.. We are already in discussion how to continue our work, and to get to ARML 2.1 in the not too distant future.

Free ARML 2.0 Webinar: on March 25th 2015!

Want to learn more about the ARML 2.0? Join the free webinar ‘Unleash Huge Market Opportunities in Augmented Realty with the New OGC Open Standard’ with our CTO Martin Lechner. Click here to register and check the schedule in your local time.