Moving forward with Vimage AR

Sergio Garcia
Aug 25, 2017 · 2 min read

Since our big win at Video Hack Day 3, we’ve been hard at work expanding Vimage to be one of the best, most user-friendly AR applications in the market. We’re excited to announce that we will be integrating MongoDB Stitch into Vimage to increase scalability and ease of deployment.


What is MongoDB Stitch?

MongoDB Stitch was recently announced at MongoDB World 17 as a Backend as a Service for MongoDB. MongoDB Stitch offers a ton of services and supports to create your next application. With MongoDB Stitch, you as the developer can focus more on innovating and creating awesome applications without toiling over creating a complex backend.

The game plan

The problem we needed to solve

When working on Vimage, our backend was becoming more complex because of all of the standalone SDK we were using to create our backend. MongoDB Stitch offered numerous services such as Amazon S3, authentication, database storage and more. After Learning about MongoDB Stitch capabilities, we realized Stitch could potentially cut down on the amount of code we used to build our backend. So we decided to make a few changes to our backend to assist in scalability and future proofing.

Authentication

We currently have a custom authentication method that allows a user to create an account and get started with their own AR campaign. We plan to take a step back and rebuild the authentication method using MongoDB Stitch Authentication service. This will allow users to log in or register quicker to Vimage by using their Google or Facebook accounts and unlock unique features from these providers such as inviting friends and social sharing.

Amazon S3

We plan to use Amazon S3 to store and serve static resources including image targets (for AR), video and more. Thankfully, MongoDB Stitch provides Amazon S3 as a service, making accessing your Amazon S3 buckets much easier and efficient by simply connecting our Amazon S3 buckets directly to MongoDB Stitch. This will eliminate the spaghetti of code that’s currently sitting in our backend and would simplify the way we make a request call for any of our static files.

Database Storage

Fun fact: Vimage AR is currently using MongoDB NoSQL as its database.

But here’s where we take things and change it up a bit. We plan on migrating our current data over to MongoDB Stitch. The reason for this decision was to keep everything in one manageable place. Using the MongoDB Stitch database, we are able to create API endpoints for the Vimage Mobile application to allow other developers to explore our data in their own creative way.

Conclusion

Vimage still has some work to be done before its initial launch, but thanks to MongoDB Stitch, the development of Vimage will become much more linear. Being able to use MongoDB Stitch as a backend service removes a ton of work that we currently have and it allows us to focus on creating more exciting features.

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Sergio Garcia

Written by

Computer Programmer

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