I want to develop an application which runs on iPhone / Android / Windows Phone 7 smartphones and is able to recognize a marker and place augmented reality content on it.
Is there any common framework which I could use for that task?
This is probably the closest you'll get:
http://nyatla.jp/nyartoolkit/wiki/index.php?FrontPage.en
Not sure about Android or iPhone, but Kevin Marshall has done some proof-of-concept work on Windows Phone 7. You should keep in mind though, that augmented reality on WP7 requires access to camera APIs that are not publicly available and as such any AR application on WP7 would not be available officially through the Marketplace. Device manfacturers (such as LG) have access to these APIs, which is how some AR applications already exist for WP7.
As Derek and Stefan point out, it appears that there are ports of the ARToolKit augmented reality framework for all three platforms.
On iPhone, you can see this in the VRToolkit sample application by Benjamin Loulier, which leverages the enhanced ARToolKitPlus library.
For Android, it looks like NyARToolkit is available, with this sample application (as pointed out by Stefan).
Finally, it looks like SLARToolKit is used in the Windows Phone 7 sample application here (as pointed out by Derek).
Be aware that this toolkit and its derivatives are licensed under the GPL:
IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING YOUR RIGHT
TO USE ARTOOLKIT:
ARToolKit is made available freely for
non-commercial use under the GNU
General Public License. Commercial
licenses to a professional
implementation of ARToolKit are
available for users for whom the GPL
is not suitable, or who require a
higher level of support, or who
require customization or other
specialist modifictions. Commercial
licenses are administered by
ARToolworks, Inc., Seattle, WA, USA.
I've seen people violating this license in their applications and derivative frameworks, so it's something to be aware of.
Did you check Layar?
AFAIK they do not support WP7 but I guess it's a matter of time.
Related
I want to start creating games for Android/IOS. I have already created 2D games using XNA and I want to publish them on other platforms even PCs but my highest priority is Mobile platforms. As I said I am familiar with XNA so I need a similar Engine for 2D. It would be great if I could write once and publish on many platforms. Please dont suggest Unity or Unreal. They are not that easy when it comes to 2D.
By similar I mean, for example, how easy to draw a sprite on the screen.
Note: I am working on Windows so no Mac suggestions please.
Regards,
You may also want to consider MonoGame ( https://github.com/mono/MonoGame/ ) as that is also an Open Source, OpenGL implementation of XNA that currently has support for iOS, Android, MacOS X, Windows and recently Linux. It is now all ES 2.0 on the mobile platforms. Our biggest change is that we now support Windows 8, and have a DirectX 11 backend thanks to SharpDX. We now also have initial PlayStation mobile support.
Actually ExEn, is a fork of MonoGame( originally called XNATouch ).
For a list of games on the AppStore or Android Market place and even NaLC, currently using MonoGame look here -
http://monogame.codeplex.com/
I hope this helps.
D.
You might want to keep up on the project called ExEn, which has already successfully ported some XNA samples and smaller games to iPhone and Android. It requires relatively little work to port and refactor to these platforms.
I suggest you check out AndEngine, its an open-source 2d open-gl based game engine that has a strong community. If you want something that you can make cross platform games with check out LibGDX It too is free, open source and based on openGl but it also allows for 3d games. It is also cross platform so a game you write for android can be compiled for, Windows, MacOS (see below), Linux. It also has a really strong community.
Regarding iOS and OSX games you really can't make them unless you buy a Mac. Apple doesn't distribute their SDK for use on any other platform but their own. That said you could maybe get something working under VMWare
Check out MOAI SDK. It's completely free and open-source. It is in beta right now but it is still pretty good. Crimson Pirates for iOS was developed with it.
Right now it supports iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux. Really good. I thought I liked Cocos2D-x, which is a C++ variant of Cocos2d-iphone supporting windows, iOS (not Mac), and Android but not truely supporting desktop kinda made me like MOAI more.
You can use C++ with MOAI or you can use Lua (they highly encourage using Lua). Being built in C++ is really great because you get access to a vast amount of libraries and you can easily bind them to Lua.
You should try games development with cocos2d.
Cocos2d is one of the best 2d engines for ios/Android I have come across.
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/
It is openGL based free engine.
Regards,
Sam
These might be useful to you. However, the first two aren't free, but they have editions for both iOS and Android.
iOS:
http://ios.xamarin.com/
Android:
http://android.xamarin.com/
I've never used either of them, but it's something I've been looking into a bit.
Apparently it lets you run C# and .NET code on both iOS and Android which is pretty cool considering how much easier drawing and things like that are in XNA compared to Open GL ES 2.0. Not to mention the fact that you'd be using C# instead of objective C.
There's also a free open source version sponsored by the same people who make the two I listed above. This one lets you run C# and .NET code on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page
I have been researching this topic intensively over the last few weeks.
I think the best solution for you is Marmalade, formerly known as Airplay SDK. It is actually more Windows-oriented than Mac (work in Visual Studio), although you still need a Mac for the final step of getting a signed app onto the store. It sounds like a very capable pure C++ product with iOS and Android as well as a bunch of other platforms, Personal license with splash screen $150 pa, single seat Professional $500 pa for all platforms. They have a 45 day trial license which I'm currently using.
I was tempted by MonoGame, could live with the $400 price tag for each platform (for the needed MonoTouch) but it is just way too buggy. The final straw was a combination of a bug causing it to crash all the samples on iOS5 and that keyboard input is broken on iOS.
Too be fair, I'm pretty sure that is all on the MonoGame side and was very impressed with how well MonoTouch worked and was looking forward to programming in c# with LINQ et al.
Since it is not obvious from the other answers, it should be noted to those who are unaware that the ExEn project and the MonoGame projects both build on the Monotouch platform from Xamarin (formerly from Novell) - which is a prerequisite for both for iOS games.
The Xamarin projects was mentioned in another answer as an alternative to Xna, but is really not. Monotouch and Mono for Android are a way to run C# and .NET on iPhone/iPad and Android.
Game development at least on the iPhone side, is typically done using OpenGL and OpenGL is also wrapped in Monotouch. The Xna implementations in Exen and MonoGame also uses OpenGL as the foundation as far as I know.
It should also be noted that Monotouch and Mono for Android are commercial products.
BTW: Exen also compiles to other platforms e.g. silverlight.
Though we can develop the i-phone application in the X-code
Why we need to use the Airplay-sdk?
can anybody differentiate between them?
I use Airplay SDK (see www.immortalcode.com) and it works well. Their code has been evolving, but it is pretty solid now. The big advantage for me is to be able to keep my source code in C++, and to be able to use a single code base for multiple platforms. I have built multiplatform games (iPhone, Android, bada, Windows) all from Visual Studio on Windows. The main caveat with Airplay SDK is that you may not get access to all the functionality you would normally have on a given platform. In particular, you probably won't get the native UI look and feel, and you may not have important options like using the ad provider of your choice. My understanding is that they've recently made strides in opening up the full range of native APIs on iPhone and Android, but still I think there will likely be problems when it comes to certain highly platform dependent stuff. Again, working with certain ad providers comes to mind as the main example.
You don't need to use the AirPlay SDK. You can write an iPhone app without it.
Airplay is a cross platform development solution allowing you to write applications for iOS, Android and other smart phone and tablet devices.
It differs from Xcode in that Xcode is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with support for writing (mainly, but not only) Mac OS and iOS applications.
Airplay is a Software Development Kit (SDK). It is not in itself an IDE. You still need to use an IDE in order to write applications, and it appears that Airplay works with both Visual Studio on Windows and Xcode on Mac OS X.
It appears that Airplay uses C++ as it's main language, providing access to iOS APIs through a wrapper of some kind. It also appears to have its own UI library, meaning your app will look the same on all devices, but not the same as other apps written natively for each respective platform.
Airplay SDK is a C/C++ programming environment that supports multiple mobile platforms. It consists of several wrappers to native libraries for various mobile OSes and consoles ( Iphone, Android and Symbian amongst them ) and of a cross compiler ( gcc under the covers ) that integrates with Visual studio ( on Windows) and Xcode ( on Mac ). The wrappers provide an uniform programming interface among all supported operative systems. Basically you develop on your desktop and then you deploy on multiple platforms with a single click. The SDK is fair complete covering 3D and 2D graphics, a basic UI framework, sound and resource managment facilities for example. The main drawback is that multithread is not supported and that it may be problematic to use native features of a given OS. Also the GUI system doesn't provide out of the box the same elegance and look and feel one can found on the Iphone or Android. On Android, Iphone and Windows there is an extension mechaninms that allows one to link native libraries. I am using it to develop a 2d platform with Iphone and Android as the main targets. I found that the programming model proposed by Airplay suits a videogame very well but it may be inconvenient for GUI-heavy applications. However the framework is extremely solid and works well and I haven't found bugs so the code is well tested. If you are planning to develop a multi-platform game you should definitely give it a try. If you need to have more control on what happens under the covers and you would like to use native features I would also consider COCOS2D-X (http://www.cocos2d-x.org/) as an alternative.
The project is still immature and has a few bugs but I have tried it and I found it extremely promising. Moreover you have full source code: if you find a bug or need an extension you are free to provide your own solution.
Marmalade / AirPlay SDK will be providing access to native UI's in a forthcoming release. Check out their road map at http://www.madewithmarmalade.com/marmalade/releases-and-roadmap
We want to build a smartphone app which uses geolocation, etc. and target the most important smartphones. Which OS would you support for a b2c application? I found a german statistic here: http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/150842/umfrage/prognostizierte-marktanteile-der-smartphone-betriebssysteme-in-2013/ which forecasts the smartphone usage for 2013. To summarize it lists the following OS, ordered by priority:
Symbian, Android, Blackberry (RIM), Windows Mobile, iPhone
Would you agree with this priority or should we start with the classical: iPhone/Android combo?
It probably depends on the market you're targeting. The statistics you're quoting might be right for Germany but in the US situation is quite different. Blackberry still holds the biggest share, but if your app is a consumer (not business) one, iPhone/iPad and Android is the clear choice. Symbian is not a large player here at all, besides, there's a lot of talks going on about a crisis of the platform so I wouldn't even take it into consideration.
Wright now and in a foreseeable near future, iPhone and iPad are the trendy options, for most categories of consumers. Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices are more the tools of business oriented people. So I guess it's more about your target audience than general usage. iPhone OS and Android will cover, in my opinion, the most ground.
The only "crisis" in the Symbian Platform is the gradual shift towards Qt. If you develop a new app for Symbian, use Qt, which is a very nice and powerful environment. The Nokia Qt SDK is worth a try.
In Europe and large parts of Asia, Symbian outsells all the other platforms combined, so the market is huge. In the US, Symbian barely exists, because Nokia isn't much of a player there.
I would recommend you to take a look at Mobile Community Framework (MCF). This is a cross-platform framework that supports all today's smartphone OS - iPhone, Android, Symbian, Blackberry and WinMobile. It can perform tasks like simple object transfer over network in Wi-Fi Ad-Hoc mode (for direct connections) or through dedicated proxy server, defining and exchanging geolocation and discovering peers running specific MCF-enabled apps in a given radius. It is free and simple to use.
More info at http://uvamobiltec.com
I'd do a quick prototype for Android (as it's a simple platform to develop for) first. Then consider iPhone & probably RIM.
Do any libraries or other development resources exist that can help reduce the effort involved in porting applications between various mobile platforms? In particular, I am interested in supporting iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7. Some areas of concern include UI, client-server communication, and hardware support (e.g., camera, GPS, etc).
MonoTouch allows you to write iPhone apps using .NET (C#). In the near future, an Android version will also be available (MonoDroid)
As for Windows Mobile, I'd forget about that and concentrate on Windows Phone 7, which will use Silverlight for apps. And of course, Silverlight is .NET as well, so you can share all your business logic between Silverlight, MonoTouch (iPhone) and MonoDroid (Android)
There is actually a really good tool out there that allows you to write apps for android and iphone in javascrpit, HTML and CSS. Then the program will port the app for either iphone or android, building the objective C code (iphone) or java code (android) as it compiles. Later revisions of the program are said to include the ability to port to palm and blackberry as well. And the bonus... free and open-source!!
PhoneGap supports Android, Blackberry, and iPhone formally. They tweeted that it works on Windows Phone 7, but it's a bit early to feel certain of that, since that OS has not shipped yet. Has reasonable but far from complete hardware support.
Well it appears that iSpectrum seems to be what you're looking for.
You'll find a video on their website homepage ( http://www.flexycore.com/ ) which shows a 3D android game they ported in only 2 days!
All mobile platforms I've encountered so far have C89-compatible compilers, so that is what you want to use for the core application logic if you have high portability requirements.
The product I'm working on can currently be built and run on Android, iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile and some other proprietary platforms (Nintendo handhelds) and legacy platforms (PalmOS, OSE) as well as "real" machines (Linux and Solaris servers).
Of course the UI code has to be written specifically for each platform, but the core is built from the same source code for all targets.
Exists an universal phone developement language?
I mean, for example, php or java or whatever
Edit : We have to develop a few phone applicatons, and we are looking for the best reusable language in differents devices (Blackberry, iPhone, Motorola, etc)
Java is as close as you'll come, but it's no where near universal (iPhone doesn't support it!)
Since iPhone's language isn't used by anything else either, it's pretty much a given that you won't find a universal solution.
Rhodes by Rhomobile is a Ruby framework for building cross-platform phone applications. It allows you to build a single application that works on all major smartphones: iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android. (The only obvious omissions seem to be OpenMoko and PalmOS/webOS, but all the phones you listed are supported.)
The way Rhodes works, is that you write your application in Ruby and your UI in HTML. A Ruby implementation, the Rhodes framework itself, your application scripts and your HTML files then get packaged up into what looks to the phone's operating system like a single native application. Rhodes then runs a webserver inside of the phone and serves the application from there, using the phone's builtin web browser UI component and a JavaScript UI library for making the web app look like a native app. (E.g. iUI for the iPhone.)
There was a nice introduction to Rhodes (with live coding) by the Rhomobile CEO at the Mountain West RubyConf 2009, the video is available at the Confreaks website.
Java (more specifically J2ME) will work on most phones. Googles Android and Blackberry development involves Java too. On Symbian-phones you can develop in C and there is an interpreter for python. If you are aiming for the iPhone market you have to stick to Objective-C and the Cocoa Touch framework.
There is no universal language, nor universal runtime that is supported by all of the major platforms. Two major players are Java on J2ME, BlackBerry and Android devices and Objective-C on the iPhone.
You might want to check out Symbian phone OS, it is intended as a common OS originally a joint collaboration between Nokia, Motorla and Ericsson. see: www.symbian.org/index.php
HTML + Javascript + CSS
PhoneGap!
It is the only cross platform mobile framework that I know of. Has feature support for iPhone, Android and Blackberry
http://phonegap.com/
Well!!! Most of the phones support java. What are you trying to do? Learn a new language?
Java is probably the closest you're going to find.
Even if you can do it, what good does it do to write a mediocre application that doesn't really take full advantage of whatever device it is on?
Bite the bullet and choose to do great implementations on a selected subset of mobile platforms.