AR VR And What It’s Good For. A new augmented future
By: Georgi Atanasov
Tags: Unity, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Hololens

Co-author: Panayot Cankov

Augmented and virtual reality, plus derivatives like MR (Mixed Reality) and XR (Extended Reality) are today’s new kids on the block. But, besides gaming and entertainment, what these new fancy technologies are worth for? Here is a story for you:

Today

You have this legacy windows forms app. You had a choice to migrate it to WPF. And now to UWP. Chances are you’ve done beautifully so far and “Telerik UI for <your platform here>” was all along the way with you. But the world is rapidly changing, even as we speak. The inevitable question is “What is next?”

Technology Giants Vision

Microsoft at Build 2018

They simply love MR. “Mixed Reality” is something between AR and VR with emphasis on interaction. Unity3D with C# is the recommended solution from Microsoft to deliver AR VR experiences for head mounted devices — these helmets and the AR HoloLens glasses. Microsoft pushes at AI delivering Azure Machine Learning Service. Microsoft also participates in the open source community JavaScript, WebGL and WebVR cross-platform solutions.

Google at I/O 2018

They simply love AR. Google is heavily investing in ARCore. You can deliver AR experiences to modern hand-held devices — the mobile phone in your pocket. ARCore has Unity3D SDK. It is capable to provide world anchors to position virtual objects, share them through the cloud and experience them together with you friends. Google also develops WebXR. So WebXR is a better WebVR in terms of performance and hardware access. “Extended Reality” is an umbrella over AR, VR and MR.

Facebook at F8 2018

They simply love VR. Everyone at F8 got a free Oculus Go to take home. Facebook’s goal in the AR VR field is to make it possible for you to be in VR and feel like you were with someone thousands of miles away, so they are all about social interaction and communication. This comes with advancements in AI and announcement of PyTorch 1.0, applied in text translation and making avatars move realistic. And a plan to push forward the hardware.

Apple at WWDC 2018

You will have to wait to see what happens on Apple’s conference. But you’ve heard rumors Apple may be up to glasses with an 8K display for each eye by 2020. And Apple did file a patent application for an eye tracking system designed for its AR glasses. Also, today Apple has a huge share of the mobile market, as well as the ARKit and Core ML frameworks.

Is AR VR the Next Big Thing in The Software Industry?

You probably are not yet 100% sure that AR VR is the future. But it feels like it may disrupt your business.

Predicted market size of AR VR software for 2025 is huge, but you live in 2018. You are not sure your line of business application fits in any of these segments. You are not sure what are the potential AR VR use cases for your business. And chances are that you have the understanding about AR VR development being hard, with a steep learning curve and you not having the time and money to invest into learning and researching it. There is also the concern that investing in AR VR solutions too early may fail because the ecosystem has not picked up yet, but on the other hand if you invest too late competition may be already way ahead.

You Have an issue — how to approach AR VR?

We believe we can help:

Telerik UI for AR VR

We, Telerik, have been delivering UI control suites for various platforms through the years — ASP.NET (MVC), WinForms, WPF, UWP, Xamarin, Kendo UI, NativeScript — to name some

We feel confident about UI! We are now building development tools for AR VR, based on Unity3D with C#. Here is why:

We believe AR VR singularity is shortly ahead

We believe AR VR will play critical role in all kinds of business applications soon

We are confident that self-contained socially acceptable glasses are almost available

Microsoft’s HoloLens $3K AR headset is amazing as it is today

We want to ensure the future success of our existing and potential customers

We’ve been investing into R&D in AR VR for 6 months now and we have gained significant knowledge and understanding about these new technologies. You can check the HoloStock demo that we’ve built and demonstrated successfully at Microsoft’s Build 2018 developers conference.

Our mission is to guide you while you build your AR VR apps using Unity3D with C# and reusing your existing .NET skills. You can now make the leap with minimal investments and a solid partner to help. And while Unity3D is game centric, we will focus on a toolset of reusable components for line of business application development. We will provide tutorials. We will share our experience. And we will be happy to guide you through a successful AR VR journey. We will make sure your apps render at top frames per second and provide high quality UI like this:

HoloLens does not provide multi-sampling anti-alias and graphic is jagged (aliased)

Our GPU shader adds anti-alias on a per-pixel basis while keeping the 60 FPS rate

We will follow up with series of developer-centric blogs to back the technology excellence of our products. But it is you who will be building the vertical stacks and the actual applications.

So Here is a 2-steps Plan:

1 — Let’s stay connected

Communication and collaboration are key to the success in such an early emerging market.

We will be investing in Telerik UI for AR VR, but we are at the beginning, our Roadmap is flexible — make sure you will benefit the most out of it; the result of such collaboration can be only highly beneficial.

If you are building AR VR apps today, you can share your pain points. We’ve isolated some fundamental missing pieces while building our HoloStock demo, but we need to know your use cases to make sure that we can build a generic solution that fits multiple businesses. Or if you are already building some components internally you can safely offload these to us and focus primarily on the business logic of your applications. Otherwise the competition may be quickly catching up with you simply because the time you invest is not in solving your domain problems, but in filling gaps that we are going to fill.

If you are planning to build AR VR apps tomorrow, you can share your vision with us and put our components on your radar. Our roadmap is not set in stone. We are agile, especially in an early market. We will be happy to talk and realign our roadmap to deliver certain missing pieces, right on time for your successful AR VR solution.

Even if you don’t plan to build AR VR apps any time soon, you can play with the demo application just for fun and some experience. People usually identify certain opportunities only when they know the underlying technology in better detail.

Business today apply AR VR successfully in education, architectural and interior visualizations, real-estate, engineering, enhanced tour guides. And the segments AR VR is applicable to will only increase.

Delivering successful AR VR story may increase revenue, decrease operation costs, open new markets or keep you up with the competition. If you decide to skip the AR VR wave, chances are that your business will probably miss opportunities and stay behind the competition.

2 — Start Your Experiments Today

We, at Telerik, have always been fans of pragmatic thinking. That’s why our initial plans are to build solid data visualization components as starters. Data is across all business segments and not a property of a single vertical. We believe that every business application will have the need to visualize data in some way, that’s why we will be building charts, graphs, heatmaps, GIS shapefiles, gauges and more.

Our 3D Charts are ready for experiments, you can give them a try, see how it goes and share your thoughts with us.

The 3D chart scene in HoloStock, visualized in Unity

We have a comprehensive tutorial, part of the download package, that will help you get started in no time. Just navigate to https://www.telerik.com/ar-and-vr-ui and follow the download link.

Act Now!

Get connected:

holostock@telerik.com

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