Metaio Augmented Reality Releases New Research & Technology

written by: Richard Kastelein

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Published on Monday, 22 October 2012 06:59

After observing a year of remarkable growth in the amount of Augmented Reality (AR) users, developers and business applications, Metaio announced at its annual InsideAR technology conference to over 500 attendees that it will introduce scalable and sustainable AR production methods in order to empower AR on every smartphone, including a unified, platform-independent solution and software development kit, a new and improved desktop publishing tool, and integration of camera technologies like continuous visual search and SLAM, effectively enabling AR on anything, anywhere. Metaio also unveiled the results of extensive R&D: Live outdoor augmented reality on downtown Munich, real-time object recognition and tracking flying at 1,000 feet; Recognizing and augmenting every image of a 100-page magazine with a mobile device; and instant, do-it-yourself augmented reality for entire environments.

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Scalable, sustainable AR Metaio introduced a single platform-independent approach for the streamlined and sustainable creation of Augmented Reality experiences to accommodate the exponentially-growing number of developers (+30k), users (+20M), brands (+2k) and OEMs (+15) actively engaging and interested in Augmented Reality.

"We're bringing the vision of the Augmented City to reality," said Thomas Alt, CEO and Co-Founder of Metaio. "We want to connect every real-world object to the internet through our technology, and we can do it." The new Metaio SDK Powered by the brand-new and revolutionary Augmented Reality Experience Language (AREL), developers, designers and publishers will be able to create a single experience with the new Metaio Augmented Reality SDK and deploy it to Android, iOS or even PC. Metaio additionally introduced a brand new version of its Metaio Creator, a simplified desktop publishing tool which will allow non-programmers to create and run AR experiences quickly and without a single line of code.

"Augmented Reality is a horizontal technology- you can do anything with it," said Peter Meier "Our unified SDK has over 500 possible technology combinations in a single, scalable SDK so that developers will be able to do anything with AR." AR on anything, anywhere Metaio integrated two chief camera technologies into its software platform: Continuous Visual Search (CVS) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). With CVS, users need only point the camera of their smartphone at a given image, surface, or even object to discover AR content. SLAM will allow developers to augment nearly any real-world environment, instantly and in real-time - a huge benefit to AR gaming and interactive experiences. Metaio has also improved the precision, accuracy, and speed of its award-winning tracking technology, assuring the most robust augmented reality in the industry.

"We've created multiplatform tools that nearly anyone can use to create and maintain augmented reality projects," said Michael Kuhn, Metaio Director of Product Development. "More than ever, we are providing the major building blocks for creating sustainable, scalable AR experiences." Munich, the Augmented Test-City For 2012 InsideAR, Metaio unveiled the first-ever outdoor visualization fusing GPS and 3-D tracking to overlay a real-time demo of the famous Glockenspiel on the Marienplatz in Munich. In addition, Metaio adapted the GPS information for central Munich to visualize line-of-sight information, unlike any GPS experience before.

• Learn more about the new Metaio Augmented Reality SDK.

• Watch all of the videos highlighting the features of the new Metaio SDK.

Learn more and download Metaio's updated products at the new Developer Portal.