Migrating from Blippar: augmented reality with Wikitude

Nania

When big players like Google, Apple, and Facebook jump on the bandwagon, you know the technology is close to mass adoption. And this is exactly the case for augmented reality.

AR is becoming part of our daily lives and the last two years, the industry boomed. Pokémon GO was a huge catalyst for AR to reach millions of users. After that ARKit was launched, and shortly after ARCore. Several companies were acquired and the AR landscape suddenly started to shift.

These dramatical and fast changes in the industry certainly bring amazing opportunities, but also many challenges. In order to gain ground, all the players need to plan carefully while maintaining proactive flexibility.

Sometimes not even an apparently meticulous strategy and a great vision can guarantee success. This seems to be the case for Blippar, a pioneer in augmented reality that has been shaping the field since 2011.

The company sadly announced on the 18th December that it is ‘entering into administration’, due to funding cuts and difficulties in boosting its revenues. It is indeed a disappointing situation for their team that has been driving innovation for so many years.

It is, as well, unfortunate to the users, who have chosen Blippar because they were inspired by its vision and believed in its product. According to a post on Blippar’s blog, its ‘services are likely to come to halt once the administrators take control of the business and its servers’. This must leave some disoriented and worried.

To those of you, Blippar users left adrift, rest assure, there are alternatives in the market and you shouldn’t give up on your augmented reality dreams.

Here’s how Wikitude can help:

We have the full package to counterbalance most of the things you were used to with Blippar: Wikitude SDK, Wikitude Studio, Wikitude App and Cloud services.

Wikitude SDK – your alternative for Blippar SDK

We won’t build your augmented reality campaign, but we will provide a powerful software that will empower you to make impressive AR experiences. The elaborated documentation, sample app, and tutorials will help you from your first steps up to advanced concepts.

With Wikitude, there is a wide range of AR features you can work with:

• Location-based AR
• Recognition & tracking of single and multiple image targets
• Recognition & tracking of objects and large scenes
• Markerless AR with instant tracking
• Extended tracking for images and objects
• Integration of ARKit and ARCore, and many more.

There are multiple ways to build your AR app, so you can choose one of the many development platforms supported by the Wikitude SDK. Our motto is to ‘code once, deploy everywhere’, so you can publish your projects to a wide variety of iOS, Android and Windows devices.

Additional Wikitude tools and services

The Wikitude Studio is, similarly to the Blippbuilder , a code-free web-based platform for creating and publishing AR experiences. Moreover, it enables developers to generate and manage target collections.



As the Blippar app, the Wikitude App makes it possible to publish augmented reality campaigns within minutes.



For projects requiring more than 1,000 target images, we offer Cloud services that enhance offline recognition, ensuring a very quick response time and high recognition rate.



On the other hand, Wikitude doesn’t cover out of the box Blippar’s barcode scanning, visual search, facial recognition, and car recognition smarts. For those functionalities, developers must use our Plugins API feature, which allows you to integrate our SDK with third-party libraries, like face detection libraries, barcode scanning libraries, etc.



No provider out there will be able to be the absolutely perfect substitute for Blippar. But we’re here to help and ensure your augmented reality projects remain up and running. So if you are looking for a solid alternative, Wikitude is able to deliver.

How to migrate from Blippar to Wikitude

1. Download our free SDK trial


2. Set up your project following the documentation and set up guides


3. Use Studio to manage your content and publish to the Wikitude app


3. Select your license or reach out to our team to help you choose the right license for you.

Before you go asking yourself what guarantees do you have when switching from Blippar to Wikitude….

• We have been in the market for 10 years
• We’re the largest independent AR company in the market
• We have our own technology and we are proactively making adjustments to better serve your project
• The main focus for us is to develop the business in line with the broader technology trends
• We have a strong global community with 100.000+ developers and established partners
• There are over 20.000 apps and over 1 billion installs powered by Wikitude
• We are here to stay!

Don’t be shy, if you have any questions or need help, reach out to info@wikitude.com anytime!