By 2014: Augmented Reality will be on every Smartphone

MUNICH, SAN FRANCISCO, September 28th, 2011: With more than 450 attendees, metaio’s annual insideAR has become the world’s largest Augmented Reality get-together with many high profile international speakers. During the conference metaio made three major announcements that strengthen its lead and position in the mobile Augmented Reality market. The first is great news for AR developers, as metaio will soon release a free version of its Mobile SDK to bring latest AR features to a broad developer community. Secondly, an easy to use AR-publishing tool called "junaio Creator" to enable virtually anybody to create AR content for junaio, metaio’s popular AR browser. This will be of particular interest for publishers and marketers who have been increasingly drawn to Augmented Reality implementations. Finally, strategic partnerships with the leading chipset IP supplier ARM and mobile platform developer ST-Ericsson on joint R&D. "We are not the only ones who see Augmented Reality as a key enabling technology in the growing mobile computing market", says Thomas Alt, CEO of metaio. "We predict AR to become a common feature on every smartphone and tablet. Of course we are pleased that our solutions have emerged as benchmarks for advanced technology and excellence in our industry, used by developers worldwide."

See the highlights from insideAR 2011 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc2BMPmN6bs

With its 10-year history as a leading pioneer of Augmented Reality, metaio continues to pursue its vision of making the blending of the digital and the real world a completely natural, everyday experience. Mobile computing is currently the fastest growing IT market, with mobile information retrieval ranging among the foremost activities of smartphone users. Due to its unique capabilities, Augmented Reality has become a powerful enabling technology for mobile location based services, mobile advertising and local couponing, print media enrichment, mobile games or even information on objects, products or posters. Within this scenario metaio expands on its already strong market position as a leader in the field by unveiling its mobile focussed strategy with three major announcements:

Free Mobile SDK to bring advanced AR Features to a broad Developer Community

In a young and still fragmented industry, metaio’s Mobile SDK platform has proven to be the most comprehensive and advanced solution to date for the creation of high-quality Augmented Reality applications with a minimum of effort. Patented GAFD, image recognition, 2D marker-less feature tracking, 3D object tracking and support for 3rd party APIs such as game engines are just some of the capabilities which make this platform the tool of choice for most serious AR developers.

In a move to give the large independent developer community easy access to the best AR tools available today, metaio announces a free version of its popular mobile SDK for download. Initially available on iOS and Android, the free version will contain some functional limitations compared to the pro version, but should be viewed as an excellent starter tool kit for developers. First shipment is planned for Q4/2011.

AR Content Publishing made easy for Everyone with "junaio Creator"

junaio as a mobile AR browser is becoming ever more popular and widely used by consumers. The possibilities offered by this platform are increasingly used by publishers and marketers around the world. The technology is equally available as the "junaio Plugin" for the creation of white label apps.

In order to provide print publishers and others, whether they work with junaio or its Plugin version, an easy, do-it-yourself way of creating their own AR Content, metaio announced today "junaio Creator", a powerful point-and-click tool for this purpose. "junaio Creator" can be downloaded at an affordable price and will be available for PC and Mac within 4 to 6 weeks.

Key Industry Partnerships: Making sure that Next Generation Mobile Devices are fully AR capable

Today metaio is proud to announce formal collaborations with ARM and ST-Ericsson.

Even the best software is limited in the end by the hardware it runs on. While hardware vendors are building ever more powerful devices, Augmented Reality has its own particular demands and often pushes hardware to the limits of current capabilities. Or better said, as available hardware becomes more and more AR friendly, the promises of the AR revolution can be implemented faster and more effectively. With this in mind, metaio has been cultivating for years a network of contact and technical exchange with companies like Intel, NVIDIA, Nokia and Texas Instruments OMAP.

"ARM’s roadmap for ARM® Mali™ graphics and compute IP not only addresses the challenges in Augmented Reality today but also sets a benchmark for the next generation of mobile AR", says Kevin Smith, VP Strategic Marketing, ARM Media Processing Division. "The combination of ARM processors and ARM Mali graphics processing units along with the strength of the Mali Ecosystem puts ARM in a unique position to provide enabling technologies to AR industry pioneers like metaio and we are working together to meet the future demands of mobile devices".

On the partnership with ST-Ericsson: "We have a common history of collaboration and innovation with ST-Ericsson", comments Thomas Alt, CEO of metaio. "Both companies are well-recognized technology leaders in their domains. We have now agreed to step up our collaboration through a series of joint research projects, but also through concrete short-term measures such as porting our mobile SDK to ST-Ericsson’s platforms."

With great AR technology, tools to help build exciting content and the kind of hardware capability to make AR an impressive experience for the user the "Augmented World" is well on the road to reality.