Android 7.0 and iOS 10 – Our Augmented Reality SDK is Ready!

Paula

Update (August 2017): Object recognition, multi-target tracking and SLAM based instant tracking: Track the world with SDK 7

In the past weeks our development team has been digging deep into public beta versions of the new iOS 10 and Android 7.0 Nougat. With yesterday’s official release of Android’s new version of the OS, we wanted to make a quick summary for our dev community of the main changes and let you know we have an SDK update coming up soon.

So starting with the good news: our augmented reality SDK is ready for both Android 7.0 and iOS 10 changes! We are happy to announce we are in final stages of building our upcoming SDK 5.3, that will be fully compatible with both operating systems.

Android 7.0 Nougat

Android 7.0 Nougat was released yesterday, slightly ahead of schedule, and it came with a couple of new features that got us, AR developers, excited. Here are our highlights:

Vulkan API support – when it comes to 3D rendering APIs, Vulkan is an awesome-to-have. This is a low level API that gives direct access of the GPU to developers, allowing high-performance 3D graphics like we’ve never seen before. So get ready for some eye-candy AR games!
New JIT (Just in Time) compiler – this will allow faster compilation and reduce the size of apps. Improved performance by this new compiler will make the building process of Android-based AR apps much faster and intuitive.
Doze battery saver – introduced already on Marshmallow last year, Doze is Android’s battery-saving feature that shuts apps down once you are done with them. No real news here, but the more battery we have for AR experiences, the better!
VR mode – coming later this year, Nougat will make apps VR-friendly with their Daydream, Google’s upcoming VR platform.
Window split mode: Apps based on Android 7.0 can make use of the new split screen feature.

Right now, Nougat is only available for recent Nexus device owners (Nexus 6, 6P, 5X, Pixel C, or Nexus 9 tablet). For everyone else, there’s still some waiting time ahead for the over-the-air update.

To summarize: overall this update will bring more opportunities to build faster nice looking AR experiences in less “heavy” apps.

A word on iOS 10

You probably have heard that Apple is working on some kind of AR project behind the scenes and that we can expect something awesome some time in the future. Tim Cook himself confirmed that AR is “…extremely interesting and sort of a core technology”. Self-driving cars or AR headset, fact is Apple’s new iOS 10 doesn’t give us much to what direction the company is going with this technology.

Apple’s new OS, just like Google’s, revolves around improved messaging systems, new emojis, heavy machine learning for images and building a smarter home with IoT. Also, making Siri accessible through apps, which is kind of neat if you would ask us.

Rumor has it that iOS 10 will be officially released in about a month. Several public beta version have been around since the beginning July and our team has explored it inside out. So far, no sign of any feature that will make AR devs be on cloud 9.

Wikitude SDK 5.3

We’re excited about the new features Android Nougat and iOS 10 bring and can’t wait to reveal our fully compatible Wikitude SDK 5.3 in the next days. The release will be available for Wikitude SDK JavaScript API, Native API and all extensions including Unity. The later will see some more features as well.

What you can expect? Improved performance, faster building time for your AR apps and an awesome new feature to those already working with our Plugins API feature.

Support for Wikitude coming to an end