Today we were excited to see the announcement that, metaio, a worldwide leader in advanced Augmented Reality solutions for will release a free version of its advanced mobile development tools. ST-Ericsson have been partnering with metaio in Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) for some time now, to find ways to exploit the full potential of this intriguing technology on mobile devices.
Chipsets that are designed to power complex consumer devices have always been optimized for particular use cases. They are typically designed to shine when streaming video, taking photographs, when playing games or surfing the web over a high-speed network – one activity at a time. When combining the use cases simultaneously, though, most current chipsets literally glow, and that’s not in the good way. That is one of the big challenges of Mobile Augmented Reality.
As you might expect, it is not just a case of adding some super- intelligent software to get an amazing augmented reality world on our smartphone displays. Instead it has required us rethink our approach to designing application processors. This is why we partnered with metaio, to learn what is expected from our hardware in the future and design our platforms to deliver the amazing experience we are all looking forward to.
So far our joint efforts with metaio have allowed us to make our current generation of application processors like the Nova A9500 and Novathor U8500 very MAR-friendly. However, this is just the beginning. What we have in mind for the future will take this to a whole other level and the coming generations of Nova application processors will be MAR’s best friends ever.