On the occasion of the Samsung Developer Conference, the South Korean company announced its AR service, an experimental viewer and an AR drawing app in the WILL 3.0 format.
Samsung it is holding its conference for developers in which they show off their latest projects to encourage all kinds of creators to be part of their product ecosystem. As we have already advanced, the South Korean company made its new augmented reality service available to attendees Project Whare, which offers cross-support between ARKit and ARCore for experiences created in Unity, with a capacity of up to 10 simultaneous users (remotely or on site), as well as persistent content and cloud hosting services. We can find more information, as well as request access through this link.
Experimental viewer using an external camera and a mobile phone.
In addition to the service created by Samsung Next, the company also showed a experimental augmented reality viewer created by Samsung Research and using the Samsung Galaxy SX (based on Gear VR SDK) so that any developer can create immersive applications compatible with any future AR viewer. Therefore, the idea behind this creation is similar to Leap Motion with its Project North Star platform. The version of the viewer that they showed at SDC 2018 and that SVGN has reported, has Unity and Java support and uses different parts such as a camera for positioning and a mobile whose image is reflected to achieve the effect of seeing the augmented world, a technique that we have seen in multiple AR cases such as Lenovo’s Mirage AR.
The current design of this viewer uses a 3dof controller (that of Gear VR), although it supports another mobile to have a remote positioned. They also claim that the camera could track, in the future, 6dof drivers. As they share, the positional tracking they have developed when having to use an external camera is not as accurate as that of ARCore, so they are looking for alternatives to improve it. Attendees were able to test a series of demos consisting of a 3D menu with access to different objects and a drawing application.
According to SVGN, the idea of the SXR SDK is to accommodate the ARCore API and Gear VR, so this move could open the door to a future Samsung case that would allow both virtual and augmented reality.
Another news they shared in this second keynote was the presentation of a application for Galaxy Note 9 that will use the S-Pen to make drawings in AR, that we could place on the environment thanks to the new format Wacom Ink Layer Language 3.0 (WILL 3.0). The format is currently in beta, so all interested developers can get in touch through their website.
