Fall is typically the season of ‘change’ and sharpening your skills after the relaxed Summer months. Our Image Recognition and Augmented Reality SDKs just got smarter, too, just in time for developers returning from their holidays.

Read our blog post to learn about some exciting new improvements. Here’s to developing even better Image Recognition and AR apps this September!

Table of contents:

1. News about our Android Image Recognition and Augmented Reality SDKs
2. News about our iOS Image Recognition and Augmented Reality SDKs
3. News about our Cordova plugins for iOS and Android
4. News about our Unity Augmented Reality SDK

1. Our Android Image Recognition and AR SDKs support new CPU architectures

Our Android Image Recognition and Augmented Reality SDKs just became more ‘buff’ as they now include support for arm64 and x86 CPU architectures.

Why is supporting these CPUs important? 

For arm devices, there are two main architectures in modern devices: armv7 (32-bit) and arm64 (64 bit). All arm64 devices can run in 32-bit compatibility mode but, if you build your apps to be compatible with arm64, you can benefit from the higher performance of the arm64 processor.

Regarding Intel processors (x86), the approach is more or less the same. Device manufacturers that use Intel processors use the x86 architecture, which is incompatible with arm. To overcome this, devices with x86 processors emulate the arm architecture, which is not as efficient as running the code that was natively compiled for x86. Our SDKs provide support for both architectures, making it more efficient for the developers and resolving these issues.

We also did other fixes and improvements in the SDKs, so visit the Documentation pages linked below.

2. Improved the usability of our Image Recognition and Augmented Reality SDKs for iOS

• Added: Callback block for the [CraftARSDK stopCapture] message (it’s asynchronous).
• Added: [CraftARCamera setCapturePreset] allows to use lower resolution video capture to speed the experience up in slow devices.

Specific for the iOS Augmented Reality SDK:

• Added: You can now control the volume of video contents when developing AR experiences. 

We also did a bunch of fixes, so head over to the respective Documentation pages linked above and check out the full list of improvements.

3. All our Cordova plugins now use the latest versions of our native SDKs

Our Cordova plugins – supporting the Apache Cordova framework – are extremely popular among developers who are looking for an efficient way to develop Android and iOS apps at once, with Image Recognition and Augmented Reality functionalities inside.

We’ve just updated all 3 Cordova plugins we have, so that they include the most up-to-date versions of our native SDKs.

4. Unity Augmented Reality SDK: added method to request the bounding boxes in image recognition response

The Unity 3D platform is a go-to choice among Augmented Reality developers these days. No wonder that our Unity Augmented Reality SDK for Android and iOS became a top choice when developing Image Recognition and AR apps using our CraftAR service together with content designed in Unity.

• We now added a method to the Unity AR SDK to request the bounding boxes in the cloud image recognition response.

Photo credits: Shutterstock/Iulia Ciornei