In February 2013 our company, Augmented Pixels (formerly AR23D Studio), received a request to develop an AR game for promotion of kids toys in a retail chain. At that moment we didn’t have the technology that tracks an image on packaging. Therefore, we decided to try third-party Augmented Reality technology.
We tested literally all technologies released by leading companies. The result was very disappointing. It was clear that while using available technologies we would be unable to create high quality product that our client and its customers would love. Each technology we tried had some serious quality issues such as slow tracking, instability in case of glare (which is crucial indoors with artificial light), tracking issues when a person is moving, limited distance to a marker (up to 2 meters), etc.
As a matter of fact, we didn’t go on with that game development project. Instead, we focused on creating a new marker-less object tracking technology. We realized that there were much more opportunities for quality technology. Since our company raised Series A from AVentures Capital, we had enough resources for the project. Marker-less Augmented Reality is still a fairly new concept that not only allows using any image as a target instead of old and ugly markers, but also overcomes some of their limitations.
It took 8 months to bring our idea to life. :-) As a result we got more flexibility in production, scalability, as well as expansion of AR application in business, education, entertainment. The product WarBot based on the new technology was released in September, 2013 in Appstore.
The very next day after the release of WarBot we received a request for a Real Estate AR solution. It is worth to mention that Real Estate is a challenging field for Augmented Reality technology because the construction models have complexity and strict requirements for realistic view. This requires additional “tricks” that can significantly decrease the performance of a mobile device. The project was a great opportunity to test our technology for complex objects. The result was phenomenal – a model with over 40,000 polygons worked smoothly and very realistically.
To demonstrate the technology efficiency we have made series of tests comparing our system to the ones by the leading providers. The result overcame our expectations, as it can be seen on the following video:
Augmented Pixels focuses on B2B solutions and now we are creating tools for retail, advertising and real estate developers. We see great demand for technology that would help companies overcome the limitations of available systems. Therefore, we are going to create and release SDK in the nearest months.
As of today, Augmented Reality is getting more and more exposure and lots of companies include AR solutions into their customer communication strategy. Experts forecast that Augmented Reality will become one of the major factors to drive retail e-commerce sales across all product categories – furniture, clothes, food, toys, healthcare, jewelry, cars, etc.
But as it is true for any business activity, quality and great user experience are crucial for the effectiveness of AR tools brands choose. Our new technology allows making high-quality marketing campaigns thus taking advantage of Augmented Reality to the full.
Our product and technology portfolio is available in Products section. If you have requests to SDK for our new technology, please contact CEO Vitaliy at vit@augmentedpixels.com