Back in 2008 when the first generation of AR-media Plugins was released, Augmented Reality wasn’t the solid and promising technology it is today, but was probably more of a very risky bet.
As Inglobe Technologies we have been among the pioneering companies worldwide to believe in AR and to invest in the development of products and solutions for Creators, Developers and Enterprises.
Since then the AR-media Plugins have written an important page in the history of Augmented Reality, conquering the trust of over 50.000 registered users worldwide who have been creating immersive contents at an amazing pace over the years.
Why have the AR-media Plugins been so successful?
The reason for such a big success relies on the fact that Inglobe Technologies understood that there were so many Content Creators out there that were looking for innovative ways to present their work to their clients, colleagues or students, even if they had no coding skills. The plugins have been used with satisfaction by Designers, Architects, Engineers, Marketers, Publishers, Teachers and many more.
The AR-media Plugins were designed starting from that intuition, providing 3D content creators with user-friendly coding-free tools that allowed for an easy authoring workflow starting from the 3D modeling software of choice. Among the supported products there were Sketchup; 3D Studio Max; Maya; Cinema 4D; Vectorworks and Scia Engineering.
Users could easily prepare their Augmented Reality experiences and then visualize them by means of the AR-media Player.
Back then Augmented Reality visualization wasn’t an all mobile and wearable thing, it was rather more frequent to view AR contents using a webcam connected to a personal computer, pointing to a previously printed marker.
The Smartphone changed… everything
Exactly in 2008, when we were releasing the first generation of AR-media Plugins, Apple presented the first iPhone, paving the way for a revolution in the area of mobile devices that is still changing our lives as of today.
The advent of the smartphone era is of vital importance for the affirmation of Augmented and Virtual Reality because it made it much easier to interact with AR contents and this trend kept growing over time as smartphones became more and more powerful.
A more recent and inevitable revolution started with the advent of wearable devices as we know them today, as Google released the Google Glass in 2013. This type of device has not yet reached the maturity of smartphones, but it is changing the way AR and VR contents get enjoyed.
Mobile and Wearable devices have changed so much our lives and brought at our fingertips an insane amount of technology and computational power for a relatively low price, opening the way for a major jump in the Augmented Reality market.
For this reason we thought it was about time we totally redesigned our AR-media Plugins and Platform in order to provide to the Content Creators a renewed and more powerful set of tools.
What can you expect from the next generation of the AR-media Platform?
We are actively working towards the release of the new generation of AR-media Platform, currently testing some of the new exciting features that will be included in the new version.
In the new version you will find a cloud based authoring tool, the AR-media Platform, where you will be able to easily create advanced AR and VR contents without any coding, as well as a set of exporters, the AR-media Plugins, that we’ll be releasing gradually for the major 3D modeling software (Trimble SketchUp, 3ds Max, etc…) and a companion mobile AR-media App.
Note that the AR-media Plugins will be a support to export the contents properly from their native programs, but they won’t be mandatory, as you will be able to export any model following our guidelines and to upload them directly to the AR-media Platform.
The viewer for the previously created experiences will be the AR-media Player as usual, that will be made available for both iOS and Android from day 1.
Among the new features we can already disclose the following will be included:
- Cloud based Experience Creation (AR-media Platform)
- Optional exporters for the major 3D modeling software (AR-media Plugins)
- Mobile viewer app for iOS and Android (AR-media Player)
- Spatial mapping to view your contents in the environment (indoor and outdoor) for a markerless experience
- Many more to come…
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