Wikitude adds Cloud Recognition and upgrades its SDK

Dan

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.

Previous Article
The ARML 2.0 standard has been approved - now official!
Next Article
The ARML 2.0 standard has been approved - now official!