The SDKs licensed by CraftAR Technologies offers tools to connect your branded mobile application with the CraftAR service in the cloud.
The Image Recognition SDK is a lightweight version of the Augmented Reality SDK that allows you to add Image Recognition capabilities to your app. It also allows you to provide a fallback of your app for Android devices that are not supported by the Augmented Reality SDK which demands more advanced device capabilities.
The Augmented Reality SDK adds rendering and tracking capabilities that provide full-blown augmented experiences inside your app. Both SDKs are designed to integrate easily into your current app.
Why two separate SDKs? There are several reasons for this:
More devices than ever before
In order to provide Augmented Reality experiences, our Augmented Reality SDK tracks objects in 3D and also renders complex scenes. All of this happens at a high frame rate to provide good user experiences. Not all devices in the market have such a level of performance.
For Image Recognition experiences, on the other hand, the important part happens at the beginning. In general, the experiences are not that computationally demanding once the object is recognized.
Finally, there are certain devices, such as Glass or smartwatches that are not meant for full-fledged AR experiences, while with the Image Recognition SDK we can provide compelling services (see Shopping with Image Recognition on Glass in our Youtube channel).
At CraftAR, we think that either we should provide high-quality experiences or we should not provide them at all.
Impact of SDK size in your app
The Tracking and Rendering modules of the Augmented Reality SDK require an SDK with a larger size on disk. On the other hand, the Image Recognition SDK is much smaller.
Where apps do not require Augmented Reality, we think it is better to make that app weigh as little as possible.
Android version supported
Believe it or not, there are still Android 2.3 devices out there. Those devices cannot be upgraded because the hardware does not support it.
Since Android 2.3 doesn’t have the most recent API advances, we stopped providing support for Augmented Reality on Android below version 3.0.
At CraftAR, we didn’t want those users to stop getting great offline-online interactions, and that is why we decided to provide the Image Recognition SDK.