Category: News

At Europe’s largest AR and VR event, Augmented World Expo 2016, Wikitude announced its partnership with Atheer, pioneer of AiR™ (Augmented interactive Reality) computing, designed to enhance the productivity and safety of “deskless professionals”.

This is a significant step on Wikitude’s initiative to boost the Internet of Things with powerful augmented reality tools for the industry 4.0. The integration of Wikitude’s AR in the Atheer AiR Suite™ is being publicly unveiled for the first time at AWE Europe in Berlin, Tuesday and Wednesday, October 18-19, at the Wikitude booth (B6).

“Wikitude is a unique and highly-valued partner for Atheer,” says Ryan Fink, VP, Business Development of Atheer. “It’s difficult for enterprises to drive real returns from just one or two software tools; it takes a lot of custom development to do so. However, with AiR Suite’s integration with Wikitude we’re able to provide Enterprises with an out-of-the-box remote collaboration solution, with enhanced AR capabilities, for the most difficult steps in their taskflows. Now, this functionality is all in one place and easily deployable on AiR Glasses and other industry leading glasses via AiR Suite.

Wikitude’s AR capabilities can also be enabled on Atheer’s AiR Glasses™. Powered by Atheer’s AiR Gestures,™ users get the powerful combination of familiar touchscreen-like gesturing with the Wikitude image recognition and tracking, for example. And because AiR Glasses™ run the standard Android operating system, it’s easier for more developers to build custom applications that leverage both AiR Gestures™ and Wikitude capabilities.

“Since Wikitude’s approach is to build and provide augmented reality technology for a variety of different industries, this partnership makes perfect sense,” says Andy Gstoll, Wikitude’s CMO. “Atheer’s AiR Glasses and AiR Suite platform allow for a partnership on two levels; integrating our technology on both Atheer’s hardware and software platforms.”

Full press release is available at Atheer’s website. 

Just a few days after the launch of Android 7 and anticipating Apple’s iOS 10 release, the Wikitude SDK 5.3 is ready for download!
This update includes compatibility for both operating systems, fix for reported issues and new features!

The SDK 5.3 will be available for Wikitude SDK JavaScript API, Native API and all extensions including Unity. Unity developers get an extra treat we’re excited to share with you!

What’s new?

• Compatibility with Android 7.0 and iOS 10: so you can have your Android and iOS apps running smoothly in both OSs.

• Fix for potential problems on IPv6/NAT64 networks on iOS: back in May, Apple announced the transition to IPv6-only network services. Our update enables all apps powered by Wikitude to comply with this requirement. 

• Fully compliant with App Transport Security (ATS) guidelines: by the end of this year, Apple will require network connections to be secured through HTTPS for any submitted iOS app (ATS). We’ve gone one step ahead and already adapted our SDK for this upcoming requirement.

• Input Plugins now available for Unity

This new feature was introduced in our SDK 5.2 for the Native and JavaScript APIs, and now it’s also available for Unity. It 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. All details from this feature can be seen in our documentation.
Furthermore you now can also set and choose the server endpoint for Cloud Recognition directly in the Unity Editor.

• New in SDK 5.3 feature: introducing Positionables

Positionables is a new piece in the SDK 5.3 and part of our Plugins API feature. It allows you to feed the SDK with information provided by a plugin and use augmentations from Wikitude’s JavaScript API.

For example, if you are using a third party library, such as a face detection plugin, you can detect one’s face and place any AR content from the Wikitude SDK directly on it! The same goes for any third-party library, such as Barcode readers, QR code scanners, OCR and more!

You can try this new feature in the Wikitude sample app under the name “marker tracking”. You can get this and other targets images used in our sample here. This feature is currently available in the JavaScript API, but not yet for the Wikitude extensions. You can check the full release notes in our documentation section.

Upgrade: the upgrade for SDK 5.3 is free for all existing SDK 5.x customers with any license type.

This is the last release for our SDK 5 series, which means you can get really excited for what’s coming next!

Download SDK 5.3

A lot of times, it’s the stuff behind the scenes that counts. Good developers know this, and we do too – that’s why we’ve expanded our Cloud Recognition service to world-wide scale.

We’re not Facebook – so why do need a global server infrastructure? Simple – better service for you, our customers.

With servers in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia, your products can dish up data with the least amount of lag-time possible. In today’s must-have-it-now world, we know attention spans are short – and we want to keep attention focused on your apps. ‘Lag time’ isn’t only important to gamers playing first-person-shooter games; it’s important to anyone using their mobile phone to access information quickly and easily.

And while the Wikitude SDK can offer up 1,000 images on the device, some apps simply need a much bigger library, and that’s where Cloud Recognition comes in. Whether your app needs to recognize the label on a bottle of wine or get multimedia content about one of the world’s biggest bands, it’s going to a snappier user experience with minimized latency and high recognition rate.

If you’re developing apps for the Asia market, there’s an added bonus – servers in China means there’s no worrying about the Great Firewall of China. Your content is guaranteed to come up no matter where it’s being requested from.

It’s all about creating better-performing tools – and with this new worldwide infrastructure behind it, our Cloud Recognition service is better than ever.

There’s a lot of noise at CES (and about CES). The Las Vegas trade show, which has been the birthplace (or at least the birthday party) for much of the past decade’s most impressive tech has come and gone, again – leaving in its wake a lot of excitement (Wow! Self-driving cars!), anticipation (when will I have a Star Trek-style Holodeck?) and a little concern (Uh-oh… self driving cars…). But while everyone’s still talking about what we saw in 2016, we’re already dreaming of what we’ll see in 2017… and beyond.

The most exciting thing for us: VR is starting to cut the cord, and the rest of the world is catching up to what we’ve been working towards for the last seven years. The people building the next generation of wearable virtual reality devices are starting to think wireless, which means a life beyond the living room.

The biggest name in VR – Oculus Rift – is a ‘tethered’ device; something that needs the processing power of a desktop computer or gaming platform to create and display a virtual world. When tethered, you can’t walk anywhere. That’s why in today’s VR games, you will always need to teleport from one room to another – you can’t actually walk.

Lighthouse tracking cuts the literal cord, but not the figurative one – you need hardware on the wall, which still keeps you from moving room to room, let alone outside. We want to operate beyond your living room – and with Wikitude’s pure visual 3D tracking, that will happen – with no additional hardware needed.

Are tethered systems better today? Absolutely. They’re more powerful, faster, more immersive and more impressive. But while the future of gaming may be ‘virtual reality’ – an immersive experience – the future of life is augmented reality. Reality, plus. The freedom to roam isn’t a maybe – it’s a must. There’s a reason the mobile market is the biggest new market created in the past two decades. What are people paying for when they buy a smartphone? A toy? No – people will pay for freedom and convenience. They want the ability to work out of the office; the convenience of knowledge at their fingertips at any time.

One piece of impressive tech helping us cut the cord is the GameFace. The London-based VR firm has been in business since 2009, and from the start, they’ve been building headsets that process and render graphics natively using nVidia internals to create a ‘head-mounted console’. According to their CEO Edward Mason, their product packs twice the power of Playstation into a wearable headset. The fan-cooled device, powered by a battery in your pocket, allows up to 7 hours of experiential use, he claims – along with the fact that the device will be shipping in early 2017.

The unseen hurdle here? We need smaller and faster processors to understand bigger worlds. We need your phone to build a virtual version of the room you’re in – and do it in nanoseconds. That’s exactly what Wikitude’s 3D slam is focused on – we have the running technology right now, and the worlds we are building will just keep getting bigger and better, as seen in our demo video below:

The next step? Something like the Microsoft Hololens or the ODG R‑7 Smartglasses. The ODG R‑7 device is bigger than your standard pair of sunglasses but smaller than a ski goggle, and packing state of the art hardware components enabling an increasingly bigger Field of View (FOV), all the pieces needed to make on-the-go 3D mapping a reality.

It’s a unique paradox – to be fully wired in and constantly connected, with a world of information and entertainment at our fingertips at any time, we need to cut the cords and get out of the house. That’s what we hope to see at CES 2017.

It’s not easy to see the future – but it’s a little bit easier when you’re the ones creating it. What we know:  The AR + VR business is poised to become a $150-billion-dollar-a-year industry by 2020. This is not a future to be missed out on – and Wikitude is ready to be a big part of it.

With new SDKs, 3D tracking, and the world’s biggest businesses going in on AR, we’ve been busy – and 2016 looks even busier. Read below for 5 reasons you need to be in AR right now – and keep reading for our state-of-the-Augmented-Reality-nation roundup.

5 awesome things that will happen in 2016

1. Space will show us why AR is awesome

As of December 5th, two of Microsoft’s Hololens headsets are on the International Space Station. While the use cases might be a little extreme for the world at large (not everyone will need a heads-up display while wrenching around in zero-gravity) there’s no question the profile is literally as high as it gets.

2. The big players are investing…

Facebook, Google, Microsoft – three of tech’s biggest names are going in big on AR. In late 2014, Facebook spent $2 billion on Oculus Rift, Google sent half a billion to super-stealth start-up Magic Leap, and Microsoft isinvesting heavily to make the Hololense the must-have tech toy (and tool) of the future.

3. …because there’s big money to be made. Billions.

150 of them, to be exact. TechCrunch is calling for the AR/VR industry revenue to hit $150 billion by the year 2020. 2015 saw Wikitude’s customer base grow in leaps and bounds. We expect only more growth in 2016.

4. VR is trending – but AR will rule the future.

We’re not building imaginary worlds, we’re making a better real world. Rather than taking us away from the world in immersive virtual reality experiences, augmented reality will seamlessly integrate with your life – and smart people like Robert Scoble are behind the idea that it’s VR now, AR next. Digi-Capital’s Tim Merel sees $130 billion of that $150 billion in 2020 coming from AR  – not VR.

5. We’re playing in the third dimension

Until now, AR has mostly been building on the two-dimensional world of planar spaces. To build the next iteration of AR, we have to track three-dimensional spaces in large and small scales. It’s more than bringing print to life –  it’s making reality more.

The reality of Augmented Reality

There’s been plenty of big news in AR this year – and plenty of rumor. Here’s the top three headline grabbing news items for 2015.

Apple acquires Metaio

The move signals a promising future for AR – and challenging times ahead for developers left in the dark by the acquisition. Over the last 6 months, Wikitude has helped hundreds of developers stay in business with the Wikitude SDK.

Everything is going up

From investments from VCs, major players like Google, Apple, and Facebook, to increasing headcounts at AR/VR firms like Wikitude, and of course, more and more businesses finding real-world uses for augmented reality, growth is happening at an explosive rate.

Magic Leap creates a buzz

Self-described ‘stealth start-up’ Magic Leap made a big buzz in 2015, with many wondering what exactly the company was built to do. All signs point to a slimmer, sexier next-gen wearable – the kind that makes Google Glass look and feel old school.

Why 3D Tracking is the most important thing we’ve ever done

To say we’ve been working hard in 2015 is an understatement – we’ve implemented Cloud Recognition for massive image libraries, released Wikitude SDK 5, plus the next generation of Wikitude Studio. Stuff we’re proud of, to be sure. But the most important thing – the bridge we’re building to the future of mass-adoption augmented-reality – is fast, accurate 3D tracking. And it works on mobile devices available right now.

Perhaps the most important part of the AR experience is making it seamless. Adding without subtracting – or, to be more clear, adding without distracting. To make AR operate within the context of the world it’s being seen in, our software needs a deep, instinctual understanding of that world –and it that understanding to be developed instantly and continuously. That’s what our SLAM 3D Tracking does. That’s a reality that developers and consumer want to live in.

AR in 2016 + What’s next for Wikitude?

With such a bright future ahead, surely you want to know what we’ve got planned for 2016.

Build technology for the here and now

While the world’s waiting for MagicLeap to actually have something to sell, the Wikitude SDK is powering
over 10,000 working apps, built by a community of over 50,000 active developers. We believe having a strong, active developer base creating working platforms is what is ultimately going to drive AR forward – you can’t sell fancy concepts and demo reels forever, you can try Wiki Wings on Android now.

What’s more, we have a razor-sharp focus on producing AR technology for developers. We’re not building the next wearable. We’re not storyboarding the next must-play game. We’re giving the people the tools to do that – and we believe they’ll be the best tools there are.

Build our business abroad

With new offices in China and soon in San Francisco, we’re going world-wide. It’s a key part of our plan to service an ever-expanding customer base that’s defining the how and why of AR implementation.

Take AR from novelty to necessity

We believe AR will, at one point in the near future, go from novelty to necessity. We are fast approaching the time when augmented reality becomes something you can’t live without.

Our software is built to serve needs that don’t exist yet. How those needs evolve depends on how well the AR experience can be integrated into our everyday lives. 2016’s ultimate goal? Build a better world!

See you next year folks!

Your Wikitude Team