The location platform for AR
By: Eric Gundersen
Mapbox AR is the first comprehensive toolkit combining AR rendering software with global location data that’s ready for today’s production applications and tomorrow’s dream concepts — built on our living location platform used by over 1 million registered developers.
AR is going to change nearly every aspect of our lives. We want to provide powerful but easy-to-use tools for connecting AR applications to the world around us. As the first platform to provide global reality-grade data, we can’t wait to see what you’re going to build.
Our AR location platform includes the following features to build your next AR game or experience:
- Live location data: Popularity of locations determined by anonymized place visit data aggregated from over 300 million users a month allows for gameplay to adjust based on when and where people are present.
- 3D digital elevation model: A global mesh including real terrain height. This elevation data is tiled into small pieces to make it distributable at scale with low latency around the globe; updates are dynamic.
- Multi-user, multiplayer support: Using the distance, angle, and position of the selected plane allows users interact and collaborate in real time, knowing the position of other devices by building up a 3D model of the device’s relative position and share this data between devices — the first multi-user AR experience built using the Maps SDK for Unity.
- Points of interest: A geotaggers’ world atlas of locations and categories of the most interesting places and the routes that people follow between them in every country around the world, letting app developers interact with millions of real-world businesses and landmarks.
- Satellite imagery compression for low bandwidth environments: Gauge bandwidth by testing the download speed and adjust compression automatically.
- Rooftop UV mapping: UV map procedurally generated polygons for 3D texture modeling process for projecting a 2D image to a 3D surface.
- High-resolution land cover and land use data classification: From NASA satellite imagery to identifying unique land cover classes ranging from parks to beaches to bodies of water to industrial areas, this is data that powers gameplay logic.
- 32-bit vertex mesh support: Load entire cities, rendering tens of thousands of buildings into a single game object.
Check out mapbox.com/ar and download our Maps SDK for Unity to start exploring. Going to GDC? Stop by our booth March 21–31 to see Mapbox AR in person.
Mapbox AR was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.