Tag: AWE

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Join Wikitude at AWE 2017

Augmented and Virtual Reality enthusiasts…unite!

If you happen to be one of the lucky 5.000 attendees expected to visit the 8th annual edition of AWE USA, the largest AR+VR event in the world, you are in for a treat.

The three-day conference, which starts today – May 31st, is being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California and apart from exploring the “Superpowers to Change the World” theme and showcasing 250+ speakers, organizations, and startups, AWE 2017 will also introduce an amusing and highly interactive 20.000 m² AR+VR experience center, also known as the “AWE Playground”.

Visitors will be able to explore over 100.000 m² of exposition ground and connect with a total of 200 innovative exhibitors, including Wikitude who is excited to be, once again, an AWE participant, silver sponsor, featured speaker and Auggie Award finalist.

Follow Wikitude at AWE USA 2017 –  (Booth #634)

Featured Talks

“Walmart’s Journey into AR // How Augmented Reality Creates Real Value in Retail” 
For those interested in learning about key success factors in AR-powered service in Retail and the benefits that arise from innovative augmented reality use, this one is for you. Wikitude CEO Martin Herdina shares the stage with Walmart’s Systems Analyst, Steven Lewis, on June 1st from 12:15 pm to 12:30 pm, Room J (Consumer Track). 

“What’s Next with Wikitude”  

Wikitude CTO Philipp Nagele will present an in-depth look into the company’s recent developments and talk about what the next version of the Wikitude SDK will offer augmented reality developers. Don’t miss the session happening today (May 31st) from 1:30 pm -2:15 pm, Room 209/210.

Press Conference

Want to hear the BIG news? Wikitude is among the selected group of companies speaking at AWE’s press conference this year. Join the most influential tech journalists in the industry on Thursday – Jun 1st, at the Main Stage starting from 9:30 am to hear the latest and greatest news on augmented reality, virtual and mixed reality. Companies joining the AWE press conference are:

Digibit
Epson
Kopin
Manomotion
Massless
Meta
Miralupa
Optinvent
Re’Flekt
Resonai
Shadow Creator
Sony
Tractica
Wikitude/Lenovo
Zappar

Auggie Awards

You voted and we got there! With the highest public voting count, we are proud to have been announced as an Auggie Award Finalist.

Wikitude’s SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) SDK is competing in the Best Developer Tools category and winners will be announced on June 1st. Thanks to our strong community for the support!

Booth 634 is the place to be

Last but not least, check out Wikitude’s recent developments and meet some of the creative minds behind our tech at booth 634 in the Tools Pavillion. Wikitude will be demonstrating its latest technology advancements including its most popular feature, Instant Tracking. 

Be WOWed by our secret Magic wand demo and see the ‘whole world’ changing in front of your eyes and don’t forget to take your freebie home: an exclusive Superhero Hyperphoto powered by LifePrint. 

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News

Augmented World Expo 2016 was the biggest and best AR event ever – and here’s why

Couldn’t make it to Santa Clara for AWE 2016? Take five minutes to find out what you missed.

The biggest Augmented Reality event in the world has come and gone for 2016 – and there’s a whole lot to talk about for anyone interested in seeing the future. Wikitude was onsite to demonstrate its latest technology advancements– and of course, see what everyone else in the AR/VR/wearable industry was up to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16KPWVPcDi0&feature=youtu.be

Show me the money

The first thing you noticed? Money. Not literally – but lurking quietly below the surface. Booths were bigger, presentations were slicker, and everything and everyone was more professional. It’s a sign that people in the know are putting investments on the line – with full expectations of real returns. We’ve had our first glimpses of the future – and it’s one full of possibilities for the AR world. Of course, that was also reflected in another metric – people. Says Wikitude’s Phillipp Nagele: “There was just so much more happening this year! I think the show must have doubled in size since last year.”

Interactivity is evolving

The layman thinks of AR as a new way to consume content or information about the world – but what some of the visionaries in the field are most excited about it how it will change the ways we interface with computers. The computer has always required a tactile interaction. Keyboards and mice have evolved to touch screens, but what’s next? The answer: nothing. Augmented reality devices will let our fingers, hands and eyes interact with digital images in ways never seen before. Check out ODG’s R-7 smartglasses – for which we’ve designed an optimized version of the Wikitude SDK. It will help you make sure AR scenarios now work flawlessly on the ODG hardware. Read the official ODG / Wikitude partnership announcement.

We made a scene at the Auggies

The Oscars to the film industry is what the Auggies are to the AR industry. Not only was Wikitude a finalist in the Best AR Tool category, WIkitude also stole the show by augmenting the Auggie this year – yep, we augmented the Auggie. After all, it makes sense, right? Watch Ori Inbar, Founder and CEO of Augmented World Expo live on stage during the keynote and Auggie Awards ceremony.

See what we had to show off

For the people that work behind the scene on AR apps, Wikitude had plenty to offer from CTO Philipp Nagele – most importantly, technical insight and an in-depth tutorial on our SDK, plus an exploration of the various complimentary and powerful tools WIkitude offers including Studio, Cloud Recognition and the plugins API, which let’s the Wikitude SDK work with other libraries to create powerful, custom-built apps with features like QR and barcode recognition as well as OCR.

CEO Martin Herdina discussed one of the most important issues for everyone in the AR space: 3D recognition and tracking of objects, rooms, spaces, and structures. With the discipline still very much in its infancy, Herdina offered rare bits of real-word experience on best practices with devices already in the market.

And, in the parlance of the film industry – that’s a wrap. AWE 2016 was an incredible event highly indicative of an incredible future. What will be talking about next year? Whatever it is, it’s surely going to be even more exciting. See you in the new future!

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News

We humans see the world in 3D – now Wikitude does, too.

This week is very exciting as the Augmented World Expo will open its doors to “everything AR”. The event in Santa Clara, California, is definitely the most important gathering of the year for us, which is why we have chosen to share more details of our SDK product roadmap with you today.

3D computer vision coming in September

In addition to our already announced and feature packed Wikitude SDK 5.0 a couple of weeks ago, we are announcing today that we will add 3D recognition and tracking capabilities to our SDK package in September. To make the waiting a bit more pleasant, we have produced this video to show you our focus on rooms, spaces and environments both indoors and outdoors.

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Rooms, Spaces, Environments – Indoor and Outdoor

As stated in my interview with Tom Emrich last month, it is a natural progression for Wikitude to move from 2D image recognition to 3D recognition and tracking of the real world. Our 2D capabilities are very mature and have been perfected to a high degree of performance and reliability, much to the appraisal of our customers building solutions that are based on augmenting 2D surfaces, such as in theScreen Shot 2015-06-05 at 17.07.22 advertising and printing industries. But the world is more than 2D surfaces, it consists of 3D spaces, rooms and environments, literally everywhere we look. As the video shows, our technology recognizes, maps and “understands” rooms to for example place digital furniture into it or to navigate through an unknown building. It allows you to create immersive entertainment in outdoor spaces, which has the potential to reinvent game play and the production of mixed reality film. Beyond the consumption of digital content in the real world, Wikitude’s 3D tracking will allow you to create your very own digitally augmented spaces. You can come up with your wildest ideas on how to design the world around you, wether it is visualizing your private house on a plot of land or perhaps a new factory, to give an example for a more enterprised application.

Our focus on technology and technology only

Computer vision is Wikitude’s DNA. Our dedicated team works day and night to build powerfulScreen Shot 2015-06-05 at 17.06.40 features for our augmented reality SDK. We do this for developers, visionaries and innovation managers with a dream, project or concept to build valuable apps for consumers, enterprise or both. Our mission is to build technology enabling YOU to “augment the world” so we can all see more than we normally could.

Meet us this week

Are you near San Francisco this week? If you want to learn more about Wikitude’s technology and speak to our team directly, come join us for these two events:

Augmented World Expo from 8-10 June in Santa Clara, our booth number is #70, right at the entrance of the exhibition area.

Sign up to “Learn about Wikitude’s AR SDK and tools” at this meetup in San Francisco on June 10th at 6:30pm.

I am looking forward too seeing you all in California this week, hope you can make it!

Andy Gstoll – Wikitude CMO

Categories
AR features

Shaping the future of technology with SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping)

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

Wikitude’s SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) SDK is ready for download!

The world is not flat and so as our technology begins to spill out from behind the screen into the physical world it is increasingly important that it interacts with it in three dimensions. To do this, we are waking up our technology, equipping it with sensors to give it the ability to feel out its surroundings. But seeing the world as we do is only half the solution.

One secret ingredient driving the future of a 3D technological world is a computational problem called SLAM.

What is SLAM?

SLAM or simultaneous localization and mapping, is a series of complex computations and algorithms which use sensor data to construct a map of an unknown environment while using it at the same time to identify where it is located. This, of course, is a chicken-and-egg type problem and in order for SLAM to work the technology needs to create a pre-existing map of its surroundings and then orient itself within this map to refine it. The concept of SLAM has been around since the late 80s but we are just starting to see some of the ways this powerful mapping process will enable the future of technology. SLAM is a key driver behind unmanned vehicles and drones, self-driving cars, robotics, and augmented reality applications.

“As we are only at the very beginning of augmenting the physical world around us, visual SLAM is currently very well suited for tracking in unknown environments, rooms and spaces,” explains Andy Gstoll, CMO at Wikitude. “The technology continuously scans and “learns” about the environment it is in allowing you to augment it with useful and value-adding digital content depending on your location within this space.”

Prototype of Google’s self-driving car. Source: Google

SLAM use-cases

Google’s self-driving car is a good example of technology making use of SLAM. A project under Google X, Google’s experimental “moonshot” division, the driverless car void of a steering wheel or pedals, uses high definition inch-precision mapping to navigate. More specifically it relies on a ranger finder mounted on the top of the car which emits a laser beam generated to create detailed 3D maps of its environment. It then uses this map and then combines it with maps available of the world to drive itself autonomously.

From the roads to the skies, drones are also using SLAM to make sense of the world around it in order to add value. A great example of this is a concept from MIT research group, Senseable City Laboratory called Skycall. Skycall employs the use of a drone to help students navigate around the MIT campus. The concept sees students call a drone using a smartphone application and then tells it where it wants to go on campus. The drone then asks the student to “follow them” and guides the student to the location. Using a combination of auto-pilot, GPS, sonar sensing and Wi-Fi connectivity the drone is able to sense its environment in order to guide users along pre-defined paths or to specific destinations requested by the user.

Track the World with Wikitude Augmented Reality SDK

Here at Wikitude, we are using SLAM in our product lineup to further the capabilities of augmented reality in the real world which will open up new possibilities for the use of AR in large scale and outdoor environments. From architectural projects to Hollywood film productions, SLAM technology will enable a variety of industries to position complex 3D models in tracked scenes ensuring its complete visualisation and best positioning in the environment. In the demo below, we show you how SLAM was used to help us augment a 3D model of a church steeple that had been destroyed in World War II by allowing users to see what it looked like before the war.

“As the leader in augmented reality technology, it is a natural process for us to expand from 2D to 3D AR solutions as our mission is to augment the world, not only magazines and billboards. Visual SLAM and our very unique approach, you may call it our “secret sauce”, allow us to provide the state of the art AR technology our rapidly growing developer customer base demands,” says Gstoll.

The use of SLAM in our augmented reality product line will be the focus of our talk and demo at this year’s Augmented World Expo which takes place in Silicon Valley June 8-10. We encourage you to come by our booth to see this technology in action!

Start developing with an award winning AR SDK

Getting started with SDK 7 has never been easier! Here’s how:

Multiple Platforms and Development Frameworks

The Wikitude SDK is available for both Android and iOS devices, as well as a number of leading augmented reality smart glasses.

Developers can choose from a wide selection of AR development frameworks, including Native API, JavaScript API or any of the supported extensions and plugins available.

Among the extensions based on Wikitude’s JavaScript API are Cordova (PhoneGap), Xamarin and Titanium. These extensions include the same features available in the JS API, such as location-based AR, image recognition and tracking and SLAM.
Unity is the sole plugin based on the Wikitude Native SDK and includes image recognition and tracking, SLAM, as well as a plugin API, which allows you to connect the Wikitude SDK to third-party libraries.

Wikitude Augmented reality SDK development frameworks

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This post was written by Tom Emrich, co-producer of the sixth annual Augmented World Expo or AWE. AWE takes place June 8-10 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California. The largest of its kind, AWE brings together over 3,000+ professionals and 200 participating companies to showcase augmented and virtual reality, wearable technology and the Internet of Things.

Help us spread the news on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin using the hashtag #Wikitude.