Re: Reviews

Augmented Reality, it is starting to evolve the way in which people interact with their environment using technology. The tech press and even the mainstream press such as the BBC are starting to report more on the happenings in AR.

With this increased spotlight, comes the attention of a wide range of people. Some are the creative type, some are entrepreneurs, whilst some others simply want to experiment with the technology in order to see what is possible.

A thing that all of these people have in common, is that they will need somebody to bring their idea to life using an AR SDK.
Often, when it comes to researching for a new tool, a developer will look online for a fellow developer’s experience with the tools that are on the market.

When it comes to AR SDKs, there has recently been a noticeable amount of activity the industry. There are new competitors coming to the market whilst some have exited. We ourselves have released our SDK to the public last summer, after four years of internal development.

You can probably understand then, as to why we find it disappointing when we find “reviews” or “case studies” comparing the existing SDKs — be it us or our competitors — that are simply not well thought out and do little beyond comparing the bullet points from the respective websites.

Some reviewers forget to mention what range of sample source code is provided with the SDK or how easy or complex it may be to integrate with the rest of the application.

Others seem to not even compare the basic performance indicators such as:

• The speed at which markerless (SLAM) tracking is ready to use
• Marker detection speeds
• The amount of markers that can be loaded for detection
• Marker tracking ability:
  * The angles at which a marker can be to the camera and still be tracked
  * Multiple simultaneous marker tracking
• The frame rate at which the devices run at when in detection / tracking mode
• Size of the embedded framework when deployed to a device

There are some amazing ideas out there that can utilise AR and we want our fellow developers to be well informed as to what the best tool for the job is!