Viro’s mission is to enable AR/VR everywhere by building the tools developers need to create amazing apps. The more we understand the real world, the better our AR experiences will become. Image recognition is a big step toward unlocking new use cases for AR and we are excited to bring this feature to ARCore/Android.

Movie Poster — Image Recognition Example

Recently, Apple (via ARKit 1.5) and Facebook Studio announced support for image recognition on their respective platforms. Viro now enables this key AR feature for Android/ARCore developers. With image recognition, developers can find and recognize the position of 2D images in the real-world and respond to them in their apps. Image recognition will enable AR experiences such as interactive exhibits at museums, bring to life movie posters with 3D characters, and assist with navigation through markers and signs.

Product Showcase — Logo Marker Demo

The Viro developer platform is the perfect alternative to specialized game engines for building AR apps: it allows developers and companies to focus on what they do best, in the languages they know best, instead of training or hiring 3D specialists. Viro’s image recognition feature is available across both our products, ViroCore and ViroReact, and the Viro platform is free with no limits on distribution.

ViroCore — SceneKit for Android developers. Written in Java, ViroCore enables developers to rapidly build immersive AR and VR applications, using familiar language and Android tools. Developers and companies who have built ARKit apps using Scenekit can now build ARCore apps using ViroCore.

ViroReact — AR/VR framework leveraging React Native, ViroReact supports both ARKit 1.5 and ARCore. Now, with Viro’s image recognition for Android, developers can build cross platform AR apps that further interact with the real world.

To help you get started with building AR apps utilizing image recognition, we made the code and assets for the Poster (Black Panther) and Car (Tesla) demos available to everyone. You can find these demos along with other sample code on our Github Pages: ViroReact Github | ViroCore Github

Getting stated with Viro is fast and easy. Check out our developer portal for instructions on getting started and extensive documentation.

We are excited to see all the great AR applications you build using Viro and image/marker recognition. If you have questions or need help, you can reach us through our contact form or through GitHub. Also, join the Viro Developer Slack to join our growing community of developers building AR and VR apps.