AR/VR: Developing an AR Platform for Marketers and Creatives

Quick Video About the Project

Customer

Headquartered in Illinois, the company is a provider of AR-infused solutions. The customer’s major product is a platform that allows for building AR-based applications, launching AR-powered campaigns, as well as storing and managing the created content in the cloud.

Business Value of AR in Media & Entertainment

How do modern businesses use AR to increase their revenues and outperform their industry competitors?

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Need

The idea was born out of the fact that transactional printing produces bank receipts and similar paper reports, and these pieces of data can be augmented and personalized to give people an individual and more entertaining experience.

The requirement was to develop a platform that will be capable of building interactive augmented reality campaigns. To achieve this, the customer cooperated with HQSoftware to implement the following features:

• AR markers recognition on scanning an image (marker-based AR)

• Markerless experiences
• Building complex 3D scenes with audio, video, buttons, 3D, and motion assets with no technical skills required
• Allowing for creating personalized content
• Supporting geolocation

• Supporting analytics, for example allowing to monitor marketing-related and user-sensitive data, such as button click ratio

Challenges

Under the project, the development team had to address the following issues:

• The platform had to be technology provider agnostic in order to depend on no third-party services as well as generate no extra expenses on maintenance.
• Marker recognition and AR scene display should perform smoothly. The markers should be securely locked to avoid flickering and be recognized stably in order to provide users with exceptional experience.
• The platform under development needed to be highly scalable and endure high loads as well as ensure timely content delivery to the user.
• The platform consists of multiple modules: back-end, front-end, iOS and Android mobile apps, third-party components. The developers had to ensure the interoperability of all modules.

Solution

To ensure future maintenance and support of the SDK, team at HQSoftware ensured that  third-party services are loosely coupled with the platform, and delivered custom middleware that would serve the purpose. The third-party services can be easily removed or replaced.

Working on module responsible for AR markers recognition, our engineers first conducted a research to find a framework that would suit the project’s needs. The AR framework was developed using Catchoom, and later Wikitude to recognize markers and add 3D objects into a 3D model. Thus, such an integration helped to avoid implementing two different frameworks for each of the modules under development. In addition, developers at HQSoftware integrated a Three.js-based AR scene editor XR Builder to manage and edit 3D objects. 

Outcome

Partnering with HQSoftware, the customer delivered a powerful augmented reality platform, which allows for launching interactive marker-based and markerless campaigns. Users can design complex AR experiences with no advanced technical skills required, put them into AR campaigns, configure and launch them. In addition, the system supports data analytics, geolocation and personalization features. Now, the system is able to handle high loads and automatically scale if needed. Thanks to the developed middleware, the third-party services can be easily replaced.

Read more about our AR and VR development services.