Immersal Cloud Service & SDK
Welcome to the documentation for the Immersal SDK.
Here you'll find general information about the SDK, detailed documentation about the APIs for different platforms, and tutorials for our sample projects.
In a nutshell, Immersal's solution is a Spatial Mapping & Visual Positioning System.
It allows developers to precisely merge and tie digital content with the physical world. It does this by enabling devices to precisely locate themselves in the physical world using what we simply call maps. The maps are created in our Cloud Service from image data submitted from various supported mapping devices, including mobile phones. One could think of Visual Positioning as an ultra-accurate GPS, but with full six degrees of freedom (6DoF) support that is updated for every rendered frame. So not only does the user's mobile device know its global position in the world, but also its exact orientation. The computer vision-based solution is also completely markerless. There's no need to print out QR codes or anything similar. The surrounding physical world itself acts as a "marker".
The Immersal SDK itself is one-half of our complete Spatial Mapping and Visual Positioning Solution. It allows developers to build persistent Augmented Reality applications and consists of:
Unity plugins (for on-device visual positioning (localization) and related functions) for iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS
Core SDK .unitypackage with C# scripts, shaders, and everything else needed to use the plugins and interact with the Immersal Cloud Service.
The other half is the Immersal Cloud Service. The Cloud Service is where maps used for visual positioning are constructed and hosted. Developers can interact with the Cloud Service via our REST API.
To enable a shared and persistent virtual world that is tied to the physical world, one must first be able to precisely locate the user's device in the real world (mobile phone, AR glasses, etc.) After you know precisely where the device is, you can figure out what virtual content is around it and how it should be rendered.
Immersal Cloud Service and SDK is a two-part solution to the above problem.
Spatial Mapping is used to build machine-readable maps of the physical world.
Visual Positioning is used to find the device's position and orientation in the maps.
Spatial Mapping
You can use our REST API to submit images to the Immersal Cloud Service and construct maps of the physical world. Using our Immersal Mapper App is the easiest way to get started.
Visual Positioning
The maps and our SDK for Unity are used to build AR applications. Our on-server and on-device localizer both enable visual positioning to the constructed maps.
Using Immersal's solution, developers can build Augmented Reality (AR) applications based on the user's device's accurate position. This means new experiences and tools that are tied to real, physical locations, persist over time, and can be shared across many users. These next-generation AR applications allow users to interact with their environment and do things never possible before.
Immersal's solution is scalable and works on locations of all sizes, both indoors and outdoors.
To get an idea of some of the possibilities, please watch a video of some of our early concept tests or a case study about an AR experience at a cinema.
Fast Visual Positioning with low system overhead.
Visual Positioning works both offline on-device and online using the Cloud Service.
Android and iOS compatible.
REST API to interact with the Cloud Service with any device.
Capable of mapping large spaces, both indoors and outdoors.
Point clouds and detailed meshes of the mapped spaces available.
Supports using multiple maps at once.
Easy-to-use Unity samples with templates for indoor navigation and more.
Detailed documentation to help developers get started.
Automatically combine multiple maps together with map stitching or automatic alignment.
Continue updating older maps by restoring the map source data.
GPS-based map tagging and searching, Visual GPS for getting global ECEF/WGS84 coordinates in any mapped area using just the device camera.
