Creating a Multi-platform Application for Augmented Reality Using Unity and Vuforia
Over the last few months, we’ve had the opportunity to work on an augmented reality project for one of our clients. To satisfy our client’s needs, we worked with the Unity 3D motor.
Why did we use Unity?
What’s good with Unity is that it is used by a large developer and business community, which means that there is a large array of products that can bracketed to this motor.
Unity + Vuforia = augmented reality
Among these products, we were seduced by Qualcomm’s Vuforia. More than 3,000 applications created by Vuforia are available, making it a pretty standard tool to develop augmented reality applications – a big plus for our clients. This Software Development Kit (SDK) is offering augmented reality functions for Unity – aka exactly what we were looking for. Vuforia is multi-platform:
Here is the app demonstration Vuforia made for Android Talk during its 2013 CES showcase:: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5kI9gtva9Y#t=80
The Test
In addition to being supported by various OS, Vuforia’s SDK is incredibly simple and has a very standard SDK installation process. We learned to handle it very quickly.
the target manager is one of the tool’s most important advantages. It helps to easily support the integration of what will be used as the target. This is actually the key element that makes this tool truly appealing and differentiates it from all the tools previously available on the market.
With all these elements, Vuforia manages to greatly reduce the complexity level of developing an augmented reality application.
In just a few hours, we were able to create a relatively simple application where we hung an augmented reality image over another reference image:
Vuforia and Unity offer a vast array of possibilities relating to augmented reality but also relating to image recognition, as mentioned on the product’s website.
