Qualcomm Releases Augmented Reality (AR) Platform for Android

Qualcomm has just announced the commercial availability of their Augmented Reality (AR) Platform for Android smartphones, which is being offered through the company's developer portal.

The new 1.0 release comes as the result of the successful completion of the beta program, and offers users the possibility to build, market and commercially distribute applications that are based on the Qualcomm AR platform.

Qualcomm notes that its award-winning AR platform is expected to enable a broad range of experiences that would deliver a new form of interactive media for users to stay entertained, engaged and informed.

“Qualcomm has a long history of providing advanced technologies that drive innovation and opportunity for the mobile ecosystem,” said Jay Wright, senior director of business development, Qualcomm.

“We continue the tradition by making leading AR technology widely available to developers for commercial use. With more than 6,000 registered developers, we look forward to a new generation of AR applications available in the Android Market and other application stores.”

The platform offers rich features capable of providing developers with the necessary means to high-performance, interactive 3D experiences on real world images, including those that can be found in print media or on product packaging.

The Qualcomm AR Android SDK comes with support for multiple development environments, and with support for native Android development with the Android SDK and NDK.

It comes with the Qualcomm AR Unity Extension, which offers support for rapid development with the Unity 3 game development tool, and with an included web application that should ease the creating and managing of image resources.

The applications built using the tool would be compatible with all Android-based smartphones that run under Android 2.1 or higher, and should offer optimal performance on handsets packing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset.

“Industry-leading performance is achieved through Qualcomm’s innovations in advanced computer vision algorithms and close integration of hardware and software. The effect of this performance is a higher fidelity user experience in which graphics content appears more real against the real world background,” the company announced.

Download the Qualcomm AR Android SDK for Windows
Download the Qualcomm AR Android SDK for Mac
Download the Qualcomm AR Android SDK for Linux