Lightship ARDK

Lightship ARDK

Lightship Augmented Reality Developer Kit (ARDK) gives developers the tools they need to create immersive, multiplayer experiences and bring them to life in the real world.

ARDK is designed for both Android and iOS mobile platforms – and integrates directly within Unity.

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Real-time mapping

Multiplayer

Semantic segmentation

Visual Positioning System

Set the realistic scene

ARDK’s meshing feature quickly builds a machine-readable representation of the physical world. Build experiences that incorporate the environment by accounting for realistic depth, occlusion, physics, placement, and more. Throw a ball, and watch it collide with real world objects or bounce as it hits the floor. Real-time mapping includes:

Real-time depth estimation and occlusion
Session-persistent meshing
Cross-platform functionality

Share and interact in entirely new ways

Unlock a world of powerful, social use cases for your app. From gaming to treasure hunts, Shared AR in ARDK lets you shift your AR experiences from single user play to multi-user, social sessions. It’s possible with tools like:

Networking APIs for synchronizing content, player actions, etc.
AR sessions shared with up to 5 users
Peer-to-peer messaging with provided server
Lightweight gaming functions
Session authentication and encryption

Know your surroundings

With Semantic Segmentation, any developer can instantly identify and mask different elements in the world around them to inform how virtual content reacts or is placed in the space. Categories include:

Water, sky, ground (natural and artificial)
Buildings
Foliage

Just released

Build real-world AR experiences with Lightship VPS

Lightship Visual Positioning System (VPS), gives developers the power to localize users and persist AR content with centimeter-level accuracy. Lightship VPS is now available in public beta within the Lightship ARDK.

Learn more about Lightship VPS

See Lightship ARDK in action with AR Voyage

For a hands-on look at the immersive real-world AR experience you can create with features available in the Lightship ARDK, download our app, AR Voyage: A Lightship Experience.

Download AR Voyage

example screens of AR voyage app experience

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Lightship ARDK?

How is Lightship ARDK different from other AR development kits?

First, Lightship ARDK’s features are fully platform-agnostic which allows for writing an AR application once and having it work across Android and iOS Devices (no platform-specific code).

Second, ARDK’s depth technology (which powers several features in the SDK) works differently than ARCore/ARKit, in that:

It works on a broader range of devices—billions of devices, not just LiDAR-capable devices as in the case of ARKit. ARKit’s Depth API uses device Lidar sensors for depth understanding (only available on high-end devices), whereas ARDK does not require this— it just needs the camera pass through.
It instantly senses depth, even the depth of moving objects, vs. ARCore’s Depth API which requires user movement to detect depth.

 Third, ARDK and its underlying services go further than the main AR toolsets today in terms of guiding developers in building more interactive and realistic AR experiences. Especially when it comes to multiplayer experiences, smart AR content navigation and placement, physics integration, and environmental recognition and masking. For example:

We provide AR Backend ‘ARBE’—managed server out of the box so that developers do not need to set up networking services for multi-player AR.
We provide APIs and examples for building gameplay and navigation around a space on top of depth estimation and meshing (for example see our “Gameboard” sample code), Our computer-vision capabilities go further than other tools as ARDK recognizes and masks a larger set of environmental characteristics (water, buildings, grass, foliage, for example).

What platforms does Lightship ARDK work with?

Where can I see the roadmap for Lightship?