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Introduction to Augmented Reality ANE

The AR technology has always been interesting since its early days and have been used in many different fields not just games. It's super useful in traveling, real estates, magazines businesses and many other samples. As the time passes, more developers are using this technology to develop brilliant applications. Maybe one of the most interesting examples is the success of the pokemon game.

While the AR technology itself is very cool, developing an acceptable application with this technology is a very heavy task. You need to consider a lot of different variables to make sure your app is working fine on all different mobile devices. Each different device may have different settings and APIs which you have to be aware of before you can develop an AR app from scratch. Besides the above general fact, Adobe AIR developers had two other big problem ahead of them.

The first barrier is the low speed of image processing in AIR applications which makes the AR experience in pure ActionScript projects on mobile very bad. While Adobe has been doing a great job in improving the AIR speed, it is still too low compared to native solutions.

The second problem is the absence of OpenGL access from AIR Native Extensions. With this problem, AIR developers cannot do the image processing part on the Native side while controlling their animations on the AIR side. Even if it was possible, it would still have been a very hard solution and needs a lot of resources to create a simple AR experience.

Notice: Chris Campbell has recently announced that they are planning to enhance the ANEs to somehow let them access 3d engines directly. While this is VERY promising, it's still very hard to program an AR experience using OpenGL on Android and iOS. But we are hoping for this to happen soon as we can't wait to update our AR ANE to also support the new ARKit which will ship with iOS 11 :D

The best current solution to bring AR tech into Adobe AIR is to use a well maintained and professionally developed AR SDK like Wikitude. So you don't have to worry about device specification changes.

Overall, with our AR ANE which is built based on Wikitude's Android and iOS SDKs, you can develop complex AR experiences with simple HTML and JavaScript languages. Code once and use it on both platforms. This is one of the main mottos of AIR too, right?