It is that time of the year again when you get the feeling that the last 12 months just passed in a blink of an eye. Yes, 2017 has come and is practically gone – and what a year it has been! At least for augmented reality, that is.
Tech giants have joined the scene, awesome new technology features have emerged, bigger investments were made in the sector and, consequently, even more positive expectation is now surrounding AR’s bright future. Before planning out promising 2018 resolutions, let’s take a look at some of the most notable happenings and insights that surrounded the augmented reality community and Wikitude in 2017.
Happy Holidays and a fantastic New Year from all of us here at Wikitude!
Augmented reality apps are becoming more and more popular with furniture manufacturer’s these days. Brands like IKEA, Lowe’s, Bang & Olufsen and Westwing to name a few are betting on this new channel to push sales and to bridge the imagination gap, leading to faster purchasing decisions and fewer returns.
These are exactly the arguments that make retailers across the globe get all excited about augmented reality apps.
This post is a guest article by our partner ViewAR, a Viennese augmented reality solutions creator who built its own AR system, used by companies such a Bang & Olufsen, Lufthansa, Novomatic, Austrian and more.
The ViewAR system is a web-based template-platform, giving developers the ability to create AR-apps for product visualization, using the Wikitude SDK, in less than 5 minutes only using HTML5 and JavaScript, with its own Content Management System and Model-pipeline.
Building the AR-furniture experience
There are two crucial elements when displaying objects in your own environment. They shall be placed on the floor or any other surface, not to float in the air. And they should be shown in the right size. This is where the Wikitude SDK comes in, where its SLAM algorithm, together with a scaling approach enables the user to do exactly what is wanted, displaying the right product at the right position at its right size with the ViewAR system.
On top of this you only need to follow a few next steps to create your app:
Set up your base info, like bundle-ID, App name, etc.
Choose a template for the industry you want to build the app for
Style your app using CSS, directly in the browser using the inspector
Add your content
Test the app using ViewAR SDK app, available both in the iOS AppStore and Google Play Store
Build on top instead of from scratch
The web-platform with its templates already provides you with out-of-the-box features for any retail application. Modules like material-switch, a web-based material-configurator, CSS-styling, Google Analytics, Report / shopping cart, Social Media Share and many more features are already pre-developed. In combination with the Wikitude SDK, which has been already integrated by ViewAR, any app can be created in less than 5 minutes.
The outcome – fully flexible AR-applications, tailor-made to any client’s needs, putting customization and client service on top. See how it’s done by watching this video:
Interested in creating an AR project of your own? Talk to one of our specialists and learn how to get started.
Wikitude SDK 7 includes a long list of changes and additions to our augmented reality SDK. In this blog post, we will go through the modifications in more detail and what they offer for developers and users.
As you will see, SDK 7 has 3 key areas of improvement: Object Recognition and Tracking based on SLAM, multiple image recognition and enhancements for iOS developers.
Bring your objects into your augmented reality scene
Let’s get started with the biggest addition in this release: Object Recognition and Tracking for augmented reality. With this, we introduce a new tracker type beside our existing Image and Instant Tracking. The Object Tracker in the SDK gives you the possibility to recognize and track arbitrary shaped objects. The idea behind it is very similar to our Image Tracker, but instead of recognizing images and planar surfaces, the Object Tracker can work with three-dimensional structures and objects (tools, toys, machinery…). As you may have noticed, we don’t claim that the Object Tracker can work on any kind of object. There are some restrictions you should be aware of and types of objects that work a lot better. The SDK 7 documentation has a separate chapter on that.
In short – objects should be well structured and the surface should be well textured to play nicely with object recognition. API-wise the Object Tracker is set-up the same way as the Image Tracker.
The Object Tracker works according to the same principle as the Image Tracker. It detects pre-recorded references of the same object (the reference is actually a pre-recorded SLAM map). Once detected in the camera, the object is continuously tracked. While providing references for Image Targets is straight-forward (image upload), creating a reference for the object is a little bit more complex.
Scalable generation of object references
We decided to go for an approach that is scalable and usable for many users. This ruled out a recording application, which would be used to capture your object. This would also make it necessary, that each object is physically present. Considering this, we went for a server-side generation of Object Targets (sometimes also referred to as maps). Studio Manager, our web-tool for converting Image Targets, has been adopted for converting regular video files into Object Targets. You will find a new project type in Studio Manager that will produce Object Targets for you. Here’s a tutorial on how to successfully record objects.
After you have uploaded your video, the backend will try to find the best possible Object Target in several computation runs. We can utilize the power of the server to run intensive computational algorithms to come to a more accurate result compared to a pure on-device solution that has to operate in real-time. Have a look at the chapter “How to create an Object Target” in the SDK 7 documentation for a deeper understanding of the process. It also gives us the ability to roll-out improvements of the recording process without the need for a new SDK version.
Rendering Upgrade: Working with occlusion models
When moving from Image Targets to Object Targets, requirements for rendering change as well. When the object has a solid body with different sides it is particularly important to reflect that when rendering the augmentations. SDK 7 introduces a new type called AR.Occluder in the JavaScript API, that can take any shape. It acts as an occlusion model in the 3D rendering engine, so you can hide augmentations or make them a lot more realistic. For your convenience, the occluder can either be used with standard pre-defined geometric shapes or take the form of any 3D model/shape (in wt3 format). Not only Object Tracking benefits from this. Occluders, of course, can be used in combination with Image Targets as well – think of an Image Target on your hand wrist, that acts as an Image Target for trying on watches. For a proper result, parts of the watch need to be hidden behind your actual arm.
Updated SLAM engine enhancing Instant Tracking
Object Recognition and Tracking is based on the same SLAM engine that powers Instant Tracking and Extended Tracking. To make Object Recognition work, we upgraded the SLAM engine with several improvements, changes to the algorithm and bug fixes to the engine itself. This means SDK 7 carries an entirely revamped SLAM engine. You as a developer and your users will notice that in several ways:
1. Higher degree of accuracy in Instant Tracking and Extended Tracking
2. More stable tracking when it comes to rotation
3. Less memory consumption
4. Less power consumption
All in all, that means that devices running 32-bit CPUs (ARMv7 architecture) will see a performance boost and perform considerably better.
Instant Tracking comes also with two new API additions. Setting trackingPlaneOrientation for the InstantTracker lets you freely define on which kind of plane the Instant Tracker should start (wall, floor, ramp…). The other API is called hit testing API and will let you query the depth value of any given screen point (x,y). It will return the 3D- coordinates of the corresponding point in the currently tracked scene. This is useful for placing augmentations at the correct depth in the scene. The SDK will return an estimate dependent on the surrounding tracked points. The video below gives you an idea of how the hit testing API can be used.
1,2,3…. Multiple targets now available
Additionally, our computer vision experts worked hard to make our Image CV engine even better. The most noticeable change is the ability to recognize and track multiple images at the same time in the camera frame. The engine can detect multiple different images, as well as multiple duplicate images in the camera (e.g. for counting purposes). Images can overlap or even superimpose each other. The SDK does not have a hard-coded limit on the number of multiple images it can track – only the processing power of the phone puts a restriction on it. With modern smartphones it is easily possible to track 8 and more images.
Furthermore, the SDK offers developers the ability to get more information about the targets in relation to each other. APIs will tell you how far targets are apart and how targets are oriented towards each other. Callbacks let developers react on changes of the relationship between targets. Developers can define the maximum number of targets, so the application does not waste power searching for further targets. The image below gives you an idea how this feature can look like for a simple interactive card game.
Boosting recognition to unparalleled distances
All developers and users that require images to be recognized from a far distance in their augmented reality scene should take a look at the extended range recognition feature included in SDK 7. By using more information from the camera frame, SDK 7 triples recognition distance compared to previous SDK versions. This means that an A4/US-letter sized target can be detected from 2.4 meters/8 feet. Calculated differently, images that cover 1% of the screenable area can still be accurately recognized and a valid pose can be successfully calculated. The SDK enables this mode automatically for devices capable of this feature (auto-mode). Alternatively, developers can manually enable/disable the function. When testing the feature and comparing it to competing SDKs, we did not detect any other implementation delivering this kind of recognition distance. All in all this means easier handling for your users and more successfully recognized images.
Bitcode, Swift, Metal – iOS developers rejoice
This brings us to a chapter dedicated to iOS developers, as SDK 7 brings several changes and additions for this group. First of all, Wikitude SDK now requires iOS 9 or later, which shouldn’t be a big hurdle for the majority of apps (currently nearly 95% devices meet this requirement). With SDK 7, iOS developers can now build apps including the Wikitude SDK using the bitcode option. Apps built with the bitcode will have the benefit of being smaller, as only the version necessary for the actual device architecture (armv7, armv7s, armv8) is delivered to the user and not a fat binary including all architectures.
As a more than welcomed side-effect of re-structuring our build dependencies to be compatible with bitcode, the
Wikitude SDK can now also run in the iOS simulator. You still won’t see a camera image in the simulator from your webcam, but you can work with pre-recorded movie files as input for the simulator.
In SDK 6.1 we introduced support for OpenGL ES 3 as graphics API. SDK 7 now also lets you use Metal as your rendering API in Native and Unity projects. Talking about new stuff, Wikitude SDK 7 also includes an extensive sample for Swift explaining how to integrate the Wikitude SDK in Swift application. Note the API itself is still an Obj-C API, but the sample makes it a lot clearer how to use API within a Swift environment.
We haven’t forgotten Android
Android developers will be happy to hear, that the Android version of Wikitude SDK 7 makes use of a different sensor implementation for Geo AR experiences. The result is a smoother and more accurate tracking when displaying geo-related content. For Android, we are also following the trend and moving the minimum Android version up a little bit by requiring Android 4.4 or later, which corresponds to a minimum of 90% of Android devices.
We hope you can put SDK 7 and its additions to good use in your AR project. We love to hear from you and we are keen to receive suggestions on how to make the Wikitude SDK even more useful to you!
Start developing with Wikitude SDK 7
Getting started with SDK 7 has never been easier! Here’s how:
Download SDK 7 and sample app (included in the download package)
At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced their first augmented reality software development kit. ARKit offers developers the chance to create digital content on top of real-world scenery on iOS 11 for iPhone and iPad through what Apple refers to as “World Tracking”.
With this release, Apple has officially joined the rising AR scene, alongside Google and Facebook, which have also unveiled augmented reality tools of their own. This means that billions of users will now be able to have everyday access to this thriving technology.
The fact that these tech giants are now investing in and promoting AR validates the market that Wikitude has been working hard to create for nearly a decade. The world finally caught up to what we and our awesome developer community have known all along: AR is powerful.
The time has come. Augmented reality is going mainstream, and we couldn’t be more excited!
Anticipating the widespread reach of augmented reality, Wikitude has been steadily developing and improving its SDK since 2009, allowing developers to create meaningful and interactive ways to tell their stories and strengthen their image and productivity through AR.
In January 2017, we launched SDK 6, the first cross-platform SLAM SDK in the market, awarded “Best Developer Tool” at AWE 2017. SDK 6 introduced the groundbreaking feature ‘Instant Tracking’ or ‘World Tracking’’ as Apple called it at WWDC.
Instant Tracking is an algorithm that immediately starts tracking the world around you, without the need for any markers. This allows users to see digital objects and information in their surroundings using any Android or iOS device.
Technical details apart, Wikitude’s markerless tracking technology has been helping companies improve their performance in various sectors: industrial, marketing campaigns, retail, planning and design, education and training, and more. Experience the ease of writing your code once and deploying it on multiple platforms and devices: Android, iOS, phones, tablets, and smart glasses.
Without a doubt, Apple’s announcement will contribute to boosting AR usage to an unprecedented worldwide scale, and we are looking forward to what lays ahead. Get started developing cross-platform AR apps today with Wikitude.
In times that augmented reality experiences must be fast, reliable and breathtaking for users, SDK performance is everything.
Since 2008, Wikitude has been building augmented reality technology and tools for developers around the world to help them effortlessly create AR apps and projects. We first started with location-based AR, releasing the world’s first AR app for mobile, followed by our 2D image recognition and tracking SDK, and since 2015, we have been sharing our efforts on our 3D tracking technology. Wikitude’s know-how and experience is reflected by the more than 20,000 AR app projects out there – powered by Wikitude technology.
So if you are now searching for a cross-platform AR SDK you can rely on, you have come to the right place. In this post we want to show you why we are confident saying Wikitude is the leading AR SDK in the market.
When we talk about performance, several factors are to be considered, some being directly related to the SDK and others related to external factors. These include for example the power of the device used in the AR experience, the quality of the target image, lighting conditions, etc.
When it comes to factors directly related to the AR SDK performance, the following three are among the important ones: speed of recognition, tracking at long distances and tracking at extreme angles.
Enough of words! The following series of videos demonstrate how Wikitude’s augmented reality SDK performs in challenging conditions.
Speed of recognition
Tracking at long distances
Tracking at extreme angles
Excited to try it for yourself? Here are some handy links to get you started:
The augmented reality industry is on fire these past weeks:
Snapchat has quietly introduced a whole new world of augmented reality right in our hands
Pokémon Go’s AR game added $7.5 billion to Nintendo’s market value
and just last week Moodstocks, French image recognition startup, was bought by Google
As pioneers in the field, Wikitude couldn’t be more excited with all the attention (and actual usage) augmented reality has gotten in the past week. In fact, there was an increase of 417% on Google searches for the term “augmented reality” in the past week.
About 1 year ago, the industry experienced a similar hype when Apple bought Metaio. Back then, our team helped hundreds of developers and agencies to migrate their apps to Wikitude. This time around, it won’t be different: we’re here to help Moodstocks-based apps to keep running smoothly and make a switch in just a few steps!
Image Recognition and Tracking, Geo-based AR, Cloud Recognition Services and content management system: Wikitude offer a full stack of products to build incredible AR apps in no time!
Wikitude SDK
The Wikitude SDK is the core of our augmented reality solution set. It provides developers with a powerful SLAM rendering engine for mobile apps and smart glasses.
The latest version of the Wikitude SDK includes all the features (and more) to keep your Moodstocks app amazing your users. Here’s a list of all features:
Geo-based AR
Image recognition and tracking
Object recognition and tracking
Instant tracking
Extended image tracking
3D modeling and presentation layers
3D tracking for Unity SDK
This means you can overlay digital content on 2D images on planar (magazines, catalogues, billboard, TV/computer screens) and non-planar surfaces (product packaging, images places on objects, etc), stick the augmentation on the user’s screen and even include location-based AR (just like the Pokémon Go app does).
Why Wikitude?
You can build your own white-label app from scratch or include the SDK in an existing app.
We have a sample app which you can use for base of your project and to test all features included in the SDK.
Choose among several development platforms and programming languages to build your app, such as JavaScript, Unity, Xamarin, PhoneGap, Titanium,JavaScript, native iOS and Android.
With Wikitude you have the freedom to choose between On-Device Recognition (offline, aka client recognition), Cloud Image Recognition (online) or a ‘hybrid’(online-offline) alternative.
Using the Wikitude Cloud recognition will allow you to add, replace or remove images without republishing your app.
Manage your AR content with the Wikitude Studio/Target manager.
And a few more things:
Stable technology: we are pioneers in the AR industry, first launching our AR SDK in 2009;
100% in-house API: our technology is robust, fast and precise, fully developed by our highly qualified R&D team;
Fast and scalable: recognize 2D targets in less than a second (current speed: 0,5 secs). You can upload up to 50,000 images in our cloud, but if you need more, just let us know;
Trusted by global brands: Wikitude is the largest independent AR SDK provider in the market. MasterCard, Johnson & Johnson, Volkswagen, Cisco, SAP, Konica Minolta, 20 Fox Century are some of the hundreds of Global brands using our technology;
Smart glasses: our SDK is optimized for the industries top AR smart glasses for hands-free experiences;
Best support team: we hear this every day and are proud of it! We’re here for you.
Are you working on building the next Pokémon Go? Wikitude can help make that a whole lot easier! Geo location, image recognition, and on-screen interactives – all right here for the taking. The next version of our industry-leading augmented reality SDK is out – and it’s got a few upgrades we think developers need to know about.
So if you’ve got the next smash-hit app for AR, hop on board – we’ve got the tools you need to build them.
Build your own Pokémon Go!
The Wikitude app was the first publicly available app that used a location-based approach to augmented reality, already in 2008. If you are ready to build the next Pokémon Go app, all you have to do is check out our Geo-based AR feature included in the Wikitude SDK.
Image credits: The Verge
With a few lines of code you can build awesome AR games that will not only augment Snorlax, Bulbasaur and Pikachu, but any 3D model of your favorite creature, along with videos, augmented buttons, html widgets and more!
Here’s how to build an app like Pokémon Go with Wikitude:
(Don’t be shy, if you have any questions or need help, reach out to info@wikitude.com anytime!)
New “Camera control feature” (Input Plugins)
This new feature (Camera Input Plugins) allows developers to feed the Wikitude SDK with their own input images and manage the camera stream on their own, making the SDK more flexible where it receives camera images from.
It’s an extension of our existing Plugins API feature, introduced in the SDK 5. The SDK comes with an extensive sample “Custom Camera” that demonstrates the feature with a custom rendered camera image using a shader for a scanning effect.
This new camera input feature also not only lets the user to provide input from different cameras to the SDK, but it doesn’t “occupy” the camera while the SDK is running, letting you multitask while other things while the SDK is running.
Making Unity better (and easier)
Our most popular plugin was updated to make product visualization even better!
We made some essential changes to the camera prefab (set up), which has been simplified in its structure. The hierarchy it previously had is now a single GameObject, making it easier to combine the prefab with other Unity objects and features, like physics engine. Most of all, your 3D content will no longer stand alone in your AR experiences!
You will be able to insert shadows, change texture on 3D models, make objects interact with each other and drag and drop several objects in the AR experience.
So whether you are building interactive augmented reality catalogues, like IKEA’s, or awesome AR games, get started today with our updated Unity extension.
In the past days we silently rolled out an upgrade to our cloud services for all customers. The update focused on bringing the components and infrastructure we are using in our Cloud Services up to the latest versions. The database infrastructure used in our Cloud Services played a crucial role, where we upgraded to the latest MongoDB version.
This upgrade, beside all the security and stability fixes you get out of it, also resulted in an performance improvement of average 10%, meaning the cloud services can handle more parallel requests and traffic.
Additionally we fixed a few UI glitches and bugs – particularly when uploading a higher number of images at the same time (>300). The new Wikitude Studio updated its duplicate check for better recognition in case you are uploading an identical image.
Generating WTC files
Wikitude Studio is the easiest and fastest way to generate wtc files, the file format recognized by the Wikitude SDK. Whether you are working with you own CMS or with a large amount of images directly in the cloud, you can use this service to automatize the generation of wtc files in just a few clicks.
If you still haven’t tried the Wikitude Studio including Cloud Recognition and the web-based Editor, get a free trial today at your developer license page. For optimal performance, Wikitude has distributed servers across the planet: Europe, Americas and China. To learn more check out our documentation section.
Augmented reality is no longer a technology of the future. In fact, since a few years it has been helping marketers to tell more engaging stories, real state agents to provide location-based home search, engineers to follow hands-free instructions guides, retailers to provide augmented reality sales assistants in stores and many more.
The latest blog post from Appcelerator features the diversity of use cases augmented reality offers nowadays and how companies are using Wikitude’s technology to increase productivity, customer engagement and revenues.
Read the full article at our partner’s blog and get started today with the Wikitude extension for Titanium! We offer free trial, quick set up guides and a sample app to get your Titanium-based app running in no time!
There’s a reason mobile developers love to integrate Unity in their apps: it’s portable, agile and in some cases, it’s free.
While known mostly as a gaming engine, Unity is also frequently employed by anyone looking to model a virtual and now augmented three-dimensional space. The finer visual details, like texture or reflection mapping on 3D virtual objects, make Unity-based apps some of the most immersive experiences available.
For the millions of developers using Unity,Wikitude’s Unity pluginis exciting – because it allows them to combine detailed, textured virtual worlds with real ones. The plugin integrates Wikitude’s computer vision engine into anything you build with Unity, which allows you to augment interactive 3D content in real time on your mobile device.
Unity is all about supporting the growing Virtual and Augmented Reality markets! The company has invested in a number of specific features out of the box, such as head tracking and an appropriate field of view, to ease the development of VR/AR apps.
“With the increasing demand for augmented reality technology among our Unity app developer community, we are excited to see Wikitude offering a free plugin to connect our technology platforms.”
JC Cimetiere, Sr. Director Product Marketing of Unity.
If you want to see the Wikitude SDK + Unity plugin in action, you’ve got the perfect chance to do so at the Vision VR/AR Summitin Los Angeles next week, 10-11 February. Wikitude CMO Andy Gstoll will be on hand to check out the keynote presentation from Alex McDowell, designer, storyteller, and creative director behind Unity’s new 5D Global Studio.
So what can you build with Wikitude and Unity? Find out by downloading theWikitude SDKand free Unity plugin – both free as trial. The possibilities are endless and we can’t wait to see your apps!
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