For the Future of Augmented Reality, Look to the Developer Ecosystem

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By Eric Abbruzzese | 2Q 2018 | IN-5103

Most of the public-facing news and excitement surrounding Augmented Reality (AR), especially in the consumer market, is tied to hardware. In a nascent market like AR, it is important to look not only at this hardware but also at the tools available to create content for the hardware. Both Microsoft and Magic Leap—two heavy hitters in the AR space, one well-established in the market and one quietly gaining funding—have expanded their developer tools to support content creation on their platforms. This is in addition to Apple and Google directly supporting mobile AR with ARKit and ARCore on mobile devices, a driving form factor for the AR market as a whole. With iOS 11.3, Apple is improving ARKit further. Hardware and content will always be a symbiotic relationship, but this is especially true in AR where everyone is looking for a killer app, a revolutionary use case, and a culture-shifting technology addition.

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Supporting from the Ground Up

NEWS


Most of the public-facing news and excitement surrounding Augmented Reality (AR), especially in the consumer market, is tied to hardware. In a nascent market like AR, it is important to look not only at this hardware but also at the tools available to create content for the hardware. Both Microsoft and Magic Leap—two heavy hitters in the AR space, one well-established in the market and one quietly gaining funding—have expanded their developer tools to support content creation on their platforms. This is in addition to Apple and Google directly supporting mobile AR with ARKit and ARCore on mobile devices, a driving form factor for the AR market as a whole. With iOS 11.3, Apple is improving ARKit further. Hardware and content will always be a symbiotic relationship, but this is especially true in AR where everyone is looking for a killer app, a revolutionary use case, and a culture-shifting technology addition.

Build It and They Will Come

IMPACT


In the Virtual Reality (VR) market, hardware began shipping with shaky developer communities. Game development names were easily involved, such as Unity, but the workflow and supporting ecosystem for VR content creation was not understood. Steps are being taken to avoid that in AR with these Software Development Kit (SDK) announcements.

Windows announced new features for its HoloLens Redstone 4 preview, including spatial mapping and environment locking improvements, as well as more dynamic Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to differentiate AR (HoloLens) versus VR (other Windows mixed reality headsets). These features are technical and developer-focused, with many users likely not knowing or understanding what these improvements mean for actual use. However, developers are able to create higher quality and more user-friendly content, which every user can understand.

Magic Leap, in comparison, just opened its developer platform and SDK, and shipped a small number of developer headsets to spur content creation. Magic Leap is far less established than Microsoft in the space, despite what its US$2 billion plus funding would suggest, but the need for quality content as quickly as possible is equally understood.

Apple’s ARKit improvements in 11.3 suggest the beginning of a long line of continuing performance improvements for the SDK, while showing Apple is committed to the technology. Fostering an AR developer community early will reap rewards as the company invests further in AR, likely through a headworn product sometime in the next one to two years. Mobile devices present a hardware path that perhaps is less flexible than headworn AR, but there is still room for AR innovation. Apple’s sensor array for FaceID on the iPhone X can be fit to the rear of the phone to create a full AR-enabled iOS platform with hardware leveraging ARKit.

Next Step: New Hardware and New Competition

RECOMMENDATIONS


In tandem with SDK proliferation and improvement, the next generations of hardware are on the horizon to capitalize on these improvements. Improvements to the HoloLens hardware platform are almost certainly in the near future. Magic Leap is scheduled to publicly launch in 2018. Apple could jump ahead of its competition with a glasses product. ARKit and ARCore are positioned as mobile device AR SDKs, but the content produced with those platforms can be pushed to glasses going forward, and so the content ecosystem will not be barren with a glasses launch. As soon as one of the major Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) launches a new AR product, its competition will follow suit, either with its own product that has silently been in development, or with a hasty announcement of interest and activity.

Amazon’s position in the tech world cannot be overlooked in regard to AR. The company has first-party hardware, a leading cloud offering, content streaming platforms covering content from professional studios to the behemoth Twitch, software distribution through Twitch and Amazon proper, and a game development stake in Lumberyard. While those pieces have not yet coalesced into an AR product or service, they are bound to. The deep ties to retail AR alone would be immense for Amazon, disregarding every other potential market AR can touch. It is already experimenting with AR in its mobile app, powered by ARKit and ARCore; expanding that further is easy to justify an investment.

The current selection of AR SDKs on offer has never been stronger with PTC’s Vuforia, Apple ARKit, Google ARCore and others both competing and cooperating to give developers choice and power. Many of these SDKs integrate with Unity, one of the leading game development engines, which bridges a gap between traditional 3D content, VR, and AR. Broader platform players like Upskill and Ubimax can be leveraged by AR customers to optimize and distribute content to users.

At a fundamental level, AR presents a new visualization option for digital content. That means AR is open to nearly limitless content types and user experiences. Just as the smartphone is still seeing developers push completely novel content, AR will take time to fully realize, which is why early developer support and investment is a boon for not only the developers but for those investing in them.

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