Qualcomm releasing innovative Android Augmented Reality SDK in spring
Augmented augmented reality
You may know Qualcomm as ‘those guys and girls behind the Snapdragon CPU’, but the company also has a strong presence in creating innovative mobile software (designed primarily, would you guess, for their chipsets).
One such area where the company has been beavering away on is improvements to the oft-lamanted Augmented Reality side of mobile gaming and apps - lamented mainly because games like Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Gunner are usually fairly shallow titles thanks to the limitations of the tech.
This is something the company is hoping to change soon, as it has revealed that its new AR SDK will be released to developers some time in spring (designed primarily for use on Qualcomm processors).
It doesn’t sound that exciting on paper, but having sampled some of the competition winners from an earlier build of the SDK, the software in motion looks highly impressive.
There’s very little delay in movement and screen for instance, so more interactive games like throwing a three-dimensional basketball into a free-standing hoop is possible (as with Bankshot by Defiant Development).
There’s also the ability to walk around the AR images in real-time, so re-arranging the track (that appeared out of nowhere on a piece of paper) in Inch-High Stunt Guy can be performed with a full 360 degree viewpoint of the situation (real space permitting).
The SDK will be for Android 2.1 and above and links in to Unity, so expect some very pretty designs to roll out shortly after its release in spring. For some more visual examples of the software in motion, take a look at the video below.
