It was back in February 2010 when Qualcomm first announced its augmented reality platform. Then in March they opened an augmented reality R&D center in Vienna, Austria; and finally in October, launched the first Android SDK in beta. Now that SDK is ready for the prime time and offered through the company’s online developer network, allowing interested companies and individuals to build, market and commercially distribute applications based on the Qualcomm AR platform.
The Qualcomm AR Android SDK supports native Android development with the Android tool chain, including the Android SDK and NDK. The Qualcomm AR Unity Extension supports rapid development with the Unity 3 game development tool, and there’s also a web application for creating and managing image resources.
Unsurprisingly Qualcomm also pitches its own products in the press release, saying that although applications built on the platform will run on all Android smartphones using Android 2.1 or greater, optimal performance will be exhibited on phones using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset. (What about NVidia’s Tegra 2?)
As a reminder, Qualcomm has recently co-operated with Big PlayAR and the Dallas Mavericks to introduce Mavs AR, which allowed fans attending the Mavs playoff games to point their smartphone running the application at their ticket to play a virtual basketball game.