iOS Augmented Reality Engine

It’s a long time ago since I was asked to build an iPhone application with augmented reality capabilities (typical feature to show stores around user’s location).

I used the http://www.iphonear.org/ project as starting point for my solution, but soon I realised that my requirements won’t be fully covered by that project so I started implementing my own ARKit Engine at that moment. Nowadays it has become a fully featured and easy to use iOS engine, which I have open-sourced and I’m really proud of the results.

It’s core features are:

• Fully compatible with all versions of iOS from 5.0 onwards.
• Supports all orientations.
• Scales and rotates displayed objects based on distance and orientation.
• Allows user interaction with displayed objects.
• Displayed objects positions are updated live (According to the user’s position).
• Supports and distinguishes front looking as well as floor looking .
• Allows any custom overlay views.
• Builtin support for radar view.
• Fully customisable.

At the moment I have used it in these iOS applications with really good results so far:

• Banco Santander
• Páginas Amarillas
• PremiaT by La Caixa

Go to the iOS ARKit Github repo to know more or try it. I’ve open-sourced it along with a demo project that shows how to use it.

 

iOS Paginas Amarillas (Yell)

Páginas Amarillas’ ‘Cerca de mi’ iOS application is one of the latest applications that we developed at Unkasoft and is probably one of the most complete ones. It includes lots of features and it took us a long time and effort to develop it but I think that the final result really worths it.

As a non technical comment, that project was particularly difficult for us because it was developed by the Unkasoft IT team, but all the project management came from the client. I wouldn’t like to generalise, there are exceptions to this, for sure, but from that experience I learnt that this kind of IT team rent out is something that companies should do very carefully. As you probably guess, in the early stages all is about courtesy and polite words, but when deadlines are approaching, that lovely environment is turned into a very uncomfortable and sometimes insane one because of irrational pressure, those typical critical features that no one ever mentioned until the demo day, those big changes required for yesterday, etc…

But let’s move forward onto some technical stuff. The application is the iOS frontend of this businesses search company, so we had to integrate with their old-style SOAP XML API. Then it was all about different ways of presenting search results and different ways of user interaction (comments, photos, …).

The application counts with typical list, map, routes and augmented reality sections for displaying search results. This latter is the one of which I am most proud of, for two basic reasons, one is that it is the most technically challenging and the second is because it was my biggest contribution to that project.

This Augmented Reality section uses my iOS Augmented Reality Engine that I had started developing some time ago for a previous project and I definitely finished and tuned it to plug it into this iOS project.

After some time and a bit more work on it I open sourced it under my Github account. You can see more about it here.

Going back to the full application, here you can see some links, some screenshots and a Youtube promotional video which, shows mainly the Augmented Reality section. 🙂

• Paginas Amarillas ‘Cerca de mi’ iOS app home page.
• App Store download link