Qualcomm Officially Releases its Augmented Reality SDK

Qualcomm has just released the official release of their Augmented Reality SDK with Unity 3.0 Support:

Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) today announced the immediate commercial availability of its Augmented Reality (AR) Platform for Android smartphones. Offered through Qualcomm’s online developer network, this 1.0 release marks the successful completion of the Company’s beta program. Developers can now build, market and commercially distribute applications based on the Qualcomm AR platform.
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The platform supports multiple development environments. The Qualcomm AR Android SDK supports native Android development with the Android tool chain, including the Android SDK and NDK. The Qualcomm AR Unity Extension supports rapid development with the Unity 3 game development tool. A web application is also included for creating and managing image resources that can be used with either development environment.

You may have check out the complete QCAR SDK Press Release.

You can download the the latest Qualcomm SDK and Extension for Unity at developer.qualcomm.com/ar

Here are the changes and known of AR SDK Version 1.0.0 compared to AR SDK Version 0.10.0 (BETA 2).

AR SDK version 1.0.0  Changelog (Features and Bug fixes):

• Added support for controlling the camera flash mode
• Added support for controlling the camera focus mode
• Added support for synchronous and asynchronous video rendering (bound to the camera capture frame rate vs. fixed rate)
• Fixed an issue where the augmented content is not rendered in the correct location in portrait mode
• Fixed issue where Virtual Buttons don’t always work with OpenGL 1.1 in the Dominoes sample app
• Renamed MultiImageTarget to MultiTarget
• Improved overall tracking and detection performance
• Improved redetection performance of recently lost targets
• Improved detection and tracking of Frame Markers
• Improved video background rendering performance
• Improved robustness of Virtual Buttons
• Changed default Virtual Button sensitivity to LOW
• Added support for the vast majority of devices running Android 2.1 and above. See list of supported devices available at developer.qualcomm.com/ar
• Simplified building of sample apps: Sample apps now use Android NDK functionality to copy the QCAR shared libraries to the libs folder
• Extended sample applications to control flash and auto focus via application GUI
• Added new tracking targets for Virtual Button and MultiTarget sample apps
• Improved the Image Target ratings mechanism on the Target Management System (TMS)
• Fixed a bug where the TMS would not accept images of certain sizes
• New Android permissions required: ACCESS_WIFI_STATE and READ_PHONE_STATE

AR SDK version 1.0.0 Known issues:

• The following screen orientations that are available in Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and above are not supported by the QCAR SDK
  • SCREEN_ORIENTATION_REVERSE_LANDSCAPE
  • SCREEN_ORIENTATION_REVERSE_PORTRAIT
• After resuming a previously paused sample app, the last rendered frame prior to pausing will be very briefly displayed. The reason for this is that Android doesn’t seem to clear the back buffer upon onResume(). You can work around this in your application by calling glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT). You may need to call it multiple times to handle the case where double buffering is enabled.
• On certain devices, the video preview rendering and the rendering layer order may be mismatched after another application overlays the QCAR rendering window.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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