We are living in a digital world, using apps to perform each and every daily task. Augmented reality has gained much popularity in recent years, Pokemon Go is one of the best illustrations of AR games, and you will not find a single person in this world who is not familiar with this game.
Augmented reality is a technology that overlays machine-generated pictures in the real world in the form of animation or making a purchase through smart devices or headsets. AR is a transformation of a normal camera; it offers an impressive, interactive, and reality-based environment to enhance the user experience.
As the future of Augmented reality apps are very bright because the customer's demand is increasing, and they want to try things before they make a purchase. So many SDKs and tools can be useful for a developer to create AR apps. A recent marketing survey shows that in the past 2-3 years, the demand for Augmented reality-based apps has increased by a handsome number.
# Vuforia
Vuforia is an advanced and modern AR building tool that offers an attractive platform for building augmented reality apps for iOS and Android platforms. It is a much popular platform in the developer community because it is broad and easily compatible with any other tool.
Vuforia offers an extensive range of products that improves user experience, Vuforia engine, studio, and chalk are some of the widely used tools. If you want to make your 3D project exclusive and want to launch in the market, this is the best ready-to-use tool.
As it is the most popular tool when it comes to developing AR VR apps, it costs $99 per month; it is not that expensive because it offers many functionalities and is very easy to integrate on any operating system. Vuforia uses computer vision technology as it is able to track scanned images and simple 3D objects, such as boxes. It is the ultimate choice for 3D and 2D projects.
# ARkit
If you love to work with the open-source platform, ARtoolkit would be a perfect choice to develop AR apps. A recent survey from Wikipedia revealed that it is a very popular tool with more than 160000 downloads every year, and this is the reason why we enjoy many augmented reality apps.
As a programmer, one of the most difficult tasks is to locate the user's location in real-time perfectly, and ARtoolkit solves this problem with ease and able to calculate the position and orientation of the real camera, it helps any AR app to reflect the digital content such as images or 3D models on the real world.
Not only Android, but Apple has also launched an ARKKit tutorial with every new version of iOS, that helps developers to integrate this tool in the app.
#Maxst
As the name suggests, Maxst offers two kinds of different SDKs, one for image tracking and another for environment recognition. The first tool can only recognize 2D images, where the second tool is more powerful and can track 3D objects.
You can generate the data online via the tracking manager, and you can scan 3D objects with the upgraded version. It supports multiple platforms such as Android, iOS, and Windows. Due to its easy integration, this tool is widely used among developers, and the website also offers easy documentation for freshers to understand.
The space mapping tool of Maxst can analyze the input, extract the data, and save it to a map file. If you want to fix the 3D objects in space, this tool is useful. These days, scan QR code and pay instantly, this technology has taken place, even human resource department is using this technology & have developed best human resouce management software, giving unique QR codes to employees, you can swiftly scan an employee's personal details, it saves time and efforts both.
#Wikitude
Wikitude is one of the best tools that focus on providing location-based AR experiences and presents real-time data via the Wikitube World Browser App. It has launched its recent version that supports localization and mapping.
The updated version of the Wikitude tool contains a lot of extensive AR features that allow you to create both marker and location-based AR applications. This tools currently provides some amazing features:
- Build apps for smart glasses
- Image recognition and tracking
- Easy loud recognition means it can target all the images hosted in the cloud
- Accurate location-based services
- Numerous external plugins, including Unity.
Wikitude offers a complete package studio to build smart AR apps. All you need to upload an image to the studio, add AR objects, add necessary effects, generate JS code, and directly paste it into the project.
# Google ARCore
ARCore is basically launched by Google and supports both the operating systems, respectively. Primarily, its three key technologies for "embedding" virtual content into the real world include motion tracking, lighting recognition, and environmental recognition.
It has the ability to build smart AR apps, and Google has been developing the basic technologies that support mobile AR over the last three years with Tango and based on that, ARCore is developed.
Another plus point of ARCore is it works without installing any hardware that means it can work across all the Android ecosystems. It can run on millions of devices, and giant smartphone manufacturers such as Samsung, Huawei, LG, and ASUS use this tool for quality and high performance.
Winding Up!
Augmented reality and virtual reality have created a buzz in the techno world, and now every business owner wants to integrate these features in their applications to drive sales. We have already seen Augmented reality apps causing a different level of excitement in users; hence developers need to learn the above tools for better output. After reading this, developers have a wide choice of AR toolkits that helps them to develop market-based and location-based applications.
You need to pick the right augmented reality tool based on your project requirement. Before choosing any tool, it would be advisable to compare features such as 3D recognition, storage facility, Unity, etc. After comparing features now, you can quickly build outstanding AR apps. Ultimately, your main focus should be on providing fast delivery of the product with maximum customer satisfaction.
