Qualcomm is beginning work on Augmented Reality supportive chips for Apple gadget’s including iPhone and iPad and the chip-maker will offer up a software developer’s kit allowing app makers to supply their software goodies to the Apple App Store.
This follows an earlier move which saw a similar SDK brought over for Android developers, that software saw 10,000 developers get on the scheme and the kit is currently in a beta version for iOS gadgets. Michael Gervautz who has been working on ‘AR’ for over fifteen years reveals that Qualcomm will have the full commercial version of the Apple kit available by the end of September. This will mean that those beta tinkerers can finally share their work with others through the popular app market.
Unlike VR (Virtual Reality), which uses a digital interactive environment, AR (Augmented Reality) is based in a real-life real-time environment viewed through the camera of a gadget such as a tablet, smartphone or gaming device and bring digital content and characters into ‘reality’ usually using some kind of marker which is picked up by the gadget producing a digital interactive sprite on the display, generally used in games.
The Augmented Reality software will support the new iOS5 and open up the software range available through Apple’s App Store which already has over 425,000 third-party apps up for grabs.
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