At today’s Mobile World Congress, augmented reality company Metaio unveiled its Unifeye Mobile SDK and Android demo at Sony Ericcson’s Creation Day. The company is offering developers a chance to experiment with feature tracking, 3D animation rendering and real-time interaction. In other words, the world of augmented reality applications is about to heat up.
We first spoke to Metaio in November when we looked at the company’s consumer application, Junaio. Since then Metaio has continued to work with clients like BMW, Siemens and Popular Science to produce augmented reality products on the Unifeye platform. Because of this established presence with major corporations, the release of the Unifeye mobile SDK should have marketers salivating at the thought of dictating the design of their own experiences.
The SDK will allow 3rd party developers to take advantage of the Unifeye platform applications including its configuration templates, 2D texture / image tracking, 3D object tracking, marker tracking, GPS tracking plug-ins, video support and web-based rendering engine. According to the company, ” You can choose from different programming layers by either using the comfortable high-level (black-box) API or having individual component access to rendering, capturing, tracking on a low-level basis.”
As more companies provide tools for the mobile AR development space, it will be interesting to see whether developers opt for their own proprietary applications or whether they choose to build their ideas within pre-existing applications via the Layar model. Regardless of how platform allegiances play out, there’s no denying that the release of new tools can only encourage further innovation in the types of experiences being developed. Perhaps we’ll see our user-generated AR experience in the near future. For more on the SDK visit metaio.com/products/mobile.
