Tag: SDK

Categories
Dev to Dev

Moving from PhoneGap to the Cordova Plugin

Hi folks,

Careful followers of Wikitude will have noticed in the past few days, we’ve moved away from PhoneGap and are now offering a Cordova plugin. As many of you know, Apache Cordova is the open-source spin-off of PhoneGap (after the acquisition by Adobe). Fear not, we haven’t given up on PhoneGap, but have renamed the Wikitude PhoneGap Plugin to the Wikitude Cordova Plugin.

PhoneGap vs. Cordova

In the past, the difference between Cordova and PhoneGap has raised more than a few questions and caused a bit of unintentional confusion, especially as both projects walked hand-in-hand in the beginning. Cordova was PhoneGap and PhoneGap was Cordova. Many people tried to compare Cordova to being the engine powering PhoneGap, very similar to Webkit acts as the engine for Safari or other browsers. Personally, I thought that PhoneGap and Cordova were too close, that a good differentiation was possible.

That all changed when PhoneGap introduced PhoneGap Build – the first service offering by the PhoneGap team, allowing to build PhoneGap apps in the cloud. Here, it became readily apparent that PhoneGap was moving towards providing a development framework and additional services based on Cordova.

Being under the Apache umbrella, Cordova is an open-source project to the core. What this means is that every other company can take the Cordova base and start building their own development framework on top of it. And companies did. There’s currently a great selection of development frameworks based on Cordova that all have their specialities and dedicated developer groups.

Look at Intel, who integrated Cordova in their Intel XDK framework, SAP making their SAP Mobile Platform compatible with Cordova or Telerik enabling their AppBuild product with Cordova. And there are are many, many more out there. This is great for providers of PhoneGap Cordova Plugins as this means that all of those frameworks can use and work with your existing plugin.

Screen Shot 2015-05-05 at 14.22.48

For us, it was time to honor this industry shift and reflect it by renaming our plugin to the Wikitude Cordova Plugin. Having a look at the data, Google Trends also thinks that it’s a good idea (see above). You can now find the renamed repositories for the Wikitude Cordova plugin on Github under wikitude-cordova-plugin and wikitude-cordova-plugin-samples.

While the name has changed, the quality you’ve come to know and expect from Wikitude will stay the same.

Head on over to the Download section to give our Cordova Plugin a spin, and let us know what you think in the comments below!

Cheers!

Phil – Wikitude Product Manager

PS: A word on PhoneGap Build – although Adobe relaxed their policy on 3rd party plugins for Build, we’re unable to provide you with direct integration, as our plugin is over the file size limit Adobe has imposed. Once Adobe ups the files size, we’re ready to go.

Categories
SDK releases

Wikitude adds Cloud Recognition and upgrades its SDK

At the biggest annual and global industry event, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Wikitude announces the expansion and upgrade of its product portfolio by adding the all new Wikitude Cloud Recognition service and by releasing its latest version of the award winning augmented reality SDK, now in its 4.1. release.

Wikitude’s all new Cloud Recognition

Bigger projects require bigger storage, that’s where the Wikitude cloud recognition comes in. Building upon Wikitude’s in-house developed image recognition engine, the Wikitude Cloud Recognition service is designed primarily for enterprise organizations that have the need to work with a large number of target images (1000+) including usage within their own content management system. The stand alone Wikitude SDK already includes an on-device / offline recognition service, allowing apps to recognize up to 1,000 images without a network connection.

However, there are projects and apps that have the need to recognize a whole lot more images. The solution for this is the Wikitude Cloud Recognition service. Wikitude’s Cloud Recognition allows developers to work with 50,000 target images hosted directly in the cloud.

Main features of the Wikitude Cloud Recognition include:

  • Search an image database with up to 50,000 images
  • The service is used in combination with the Wikitude SDK offering a simple and convenient way to use Cloud Recognition
  • Two modes supported:
    • Continuous Search (camera constantly screens for target image)
    • Tap to Scan  (take a photo of the target image)
  • Free trial available – each commercial license includes 1,000,000 requests to the service

An enterprise example use case for the Wikitude Cloud Recognition service can be found in the wine industry. Here, a vast number of different packaging and labels require a large database of targets that can be scanned and recognized. 1,000 target images would be a good start, but in industries where there are millions of images to be scanned, the Wikitude Cloud Recognition service is the appropriate solution.

To get started, Wikitude provides a trial token for each user account to test the Cloud Recognition for free (free developer account required). This trial token has a set quota limit that allows developers to try and test the functionality of the service. For production systems, Wikitude offers commercial licenses with various quota limits based on the number of images in your database.

The all-new Wikitude Cloud Recognition service is now live and ready for use. More information as well as a free trial are available at www.wikitude.com/products/wikitude-cloud-recognition/.

The Wikitude SDK 4.1

Concurrently, Wikitude is releasing an updated version of its augmented reality SDK. The Wikitude SDK 4.1 for Android and iOS integrates the functionality to conveniently work with the Wikitude Cloud Recognition service. The SDK can either periodically send images to the cloud server to be recognized (Continuous Search) or transmit just a single still image of the camera live feed (Tap to Scan). The Wikitude SDK does all the heavy lifting for developers in terms of network communication and camera handling – working with the Cloud Recognition service in the SDK is straightforward and simple.

The Wikitude team worked on further pushing the limits on the performance on-device recognition. The results are considerably improved speed and reliability for recognizing target images. Please see the migration guide on how to benefit from the new target collection format. This also includes the ability to define the physical size of your target image, which then enables a feature called “Distance to user” – the Wikitude SDK calculates the distance to the target image, which can then be queried.

The Wikitude SDK 4.1 now also is able to use the front-facing camera as input feed. Augmenting your selfies has never been easier. This also brings additional controls for interacting with the camera for SDK developers. If needed developers can control zoom and focus of the camera image for their augmented reality experience.

Together with native support for devices running a 64-bit ARM chipset like the Tegra K1 (Nexus 9) the team worked on optimizing low-level functions, taking further advantage of the ARM NEON technology. This makes image tracking faster and less computationally intensive.

On the 3D rendering side the Wikitude SDK 4.1 release fixes several issues leading to increased memory consumption, an issue with animated 3D models not clickable and added supported for clicks on different 3D model parts. The click event now will return the clicked 3D mesh part.

All the new features are captured in an updated sample app shipping together with the SDK and also available on GitHub. Immediately available for Android and iOS. Supported extensions (PhoneGap, Titanium and Xamarin) will be updated in the next days.

This is a free upgrade for all 4.0 users – customers running SDK 2.x or 3.x can purchase upgrades for Wikitude SDK PRO and Wikitude SDK LITE in the online store.

Categories
News

Wikitude, in cooperation with SAP and Marenco, presented 3D augmented helicopter on smart glasses at Augmented World Expo

Santa Clara, 10th June 2014 – At the annual Augmented World Expo, where the global augmented reality (AR) industry gathered once again to innovate, revolutionize and dream, Wikitude surprised with its latest augmented reality innovation. In cooperation with the SAP® Co-Innovation Lab and Marenco Swissconsulting AG, the AR leader demonstrated how enterprise customers can leverage augmented reality technology to add value and efficiencies to their business processes.

Hands-free Enterprise Application

With the latest augmented reality smart glasses in front of your eyes and by simply “looking” at the unique glass cockpit of Marenco’s helicopter at the Wikitude booth, information drawn from the SAP solution on the backend was displayed instructing users how to disassemble a turbine step by step. The information provided ranged from augmented multimedia content like video and audio to complex 3D objects containing metadata. When used together with SAP 3D Visual Enterprise applications, these industrial solutions are taken to the next level to address the needs of enterprise product lifecycle management. Beside Google Glass, the demonstration was also experienced on Epson’s Moverio BT-200 as well as Vuzix’s M100 smart glasses. Wikitude’s augmented reality software development kit (SDK) has been optimized for these wearable smart glasses and provides the underlying platform for hands-free business applications.

Google Glass AR SDKEpson Moverio AR SDK

“There is an increasing demand for augmented reality applications in the enterprise sector, and we are thrilled to cooperate with both SAP and Marenco to show today what business applications on mobile devices and wearables will look like in the very near future,” said Andy Gstoll, CMO Wikitude.

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