visionar updates its AR ecosystem and brings great cost savings to customers
Still in the first half of 2019 visionar 2.0. should be launched without Vuforia but with googles ARCore and Apples ARKit.
Under the name of “visionar 2.0”, visionar is currently developing a new version of the visionar SDK, which does not use the Vuforia SDK, but an alternative from Google and Apple.
The reason for this update lies above all in the costs. Currently every user of the visionar SDK must buy a Vuforia license. The costs for it are currently about 100 EUR per month. Google’s ARCore and Apple’s ARKit, however, offer identical features and are for free – even for commercial use!
This allows app developers to significantly reduce costs.
Sample calculation:
Vuforia license per month: 99.00 USD (= 87 EUR) per month
+ visionar license (for example standard subscription): 19.99 EUR per month
In total, about 107.00 EUR per month for the licenses.
With “visionar 2.0” the Vuforia license costs are completely gone and the developer only pays for the visionar license, for example, 19.99 EUR per month.
Since visionar attaches importance to the quality of the offered products, it has not been possible to rely on an alternative as these are still in their infancy. ARCore, for example, could not map the augmented reality features on all popular Android devices.
With the launch of ARCore 1.7, this has now changed. There shows up the possibility in the future for visionar to provide its AR features in full extend without Vuforia on most Android devices.
“Our vision has always been to provide functionalities for both platforms – iOS and Android. This will soon be possible with ARKit and the further development of ARCore. It will allow us to bypass the paid Vuforia license, which means a drastic reduction in costs for all our customers, “says Thomas Toffalori, head of the development department of visionar.
For the developer, all steps that deal with Vuforia, cease. This means creating a Vuforia account, purchasing a license, entering a license key on the frontend / CMS, entering database keys on the iOS / Android SDK – all this will soon be a thing of the past.
Now, visionar developers are working hard on the visionar 2.0 release. The launch is planned for the first half of 2019.