A Quick Look at the Vuforia Software Development Kit for Augmented Reality
As are many of you, I’m excited to follow technology news and predict what affordances will become available for learning and performance support solutions using augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Today, I’m going to focus on Vuforia, which is a toolkit for programmers to add AR functionality into their apps.
A couple examples of how AR can provide performance support include:
- Recognizing parts that need to be assembled and providing each instruction when it’s needed.
- Translating information from one language to another (e.g., interpreting signage in a foreign country).
What does Vuforia Do?
Vuforia recognizes items at which you point your device’s camera — essentially making QR codes out of things that aren’t QR codes. It recognizes objects, images, cylinders, text (more than 100,000 words in a variety of different fonts), multi-targets, and VuMarks (which I interpret as QR codes that can be styled).
If you’d like to see for yourself what Vuforia can do, check out:
Vuforia supports a wide range of devices, including phones, tablets, notebooks, glasses, and viewers. It also supports Android (Android Studio), iOS (Xcode), and Universal Windows Platform (UWP). Future versions of Unity will provide Vuforia automatically. This link provides a Vuforia for Unity Roadmap: https://unity3d.com/partners/vuforia.
AR Resources
Vuforia is just one of many AR toolkits; more AR items are coming onto the market almost daily. To learn more about AR, reference the resources below:
E-learning designers and developers have a lot to learn to make the best use of AR in performance support solutions. I couldn’t be more thrilled! A lot to learn means lots of room to innovate!
