From a game, to Rokid's AR ecological dream
On January 20, 2024, the lunar calendar is cold, and the temperature at noon in Hefei is only 2 degrees.
However, at the 2024 AR Ecological Conference and the 2nd AR Application Development Competition finals held by Rokid, everyone felt that it was still hot. AR developers from all over the world are vying to showcase their Rokid AR applications. Some of them have developed "MR Kyuki", which relies entirely on gestures, some have developed "Zhihu Zhenye", which is fun and educational for children with autism, and some have brought real-time space battle social games to lightweight AR glasses.
Different ideas, different applications, what they all have in common is that they are all AR developers, and they are all based on the Rokid AR Studio device.
This is not an easy task. Developers often choose a development platform to invest a lot of time, energy and cost, so it is natural to be cautious in choosing a development platform, and Rokid can get the support of a large number of AR developers, which just shows that the AR developer community recognizes the Rokid platform.
Member of the Dimensional Rift Scientific Expedition Group
At the conference, I also saw a group of developers from NetEase, Tencent, vivo, Nvidia and other major manufacturers set up a team of developers - Dimensional Crack Research Group, they developed a variety of AR applications such as "Table Drum" and "Mosquito War" based on the Rokid AR Studio platform.
From an AR developer's perspective, this recognition is a no-brainer. In the past year, Rokid has proven their determination and strength to promote the AR ecosystem, and according to Misa, founder and CEO of Rokid, Rokid will not only not stop in the next few years, but will continue to increase its support for AR developers.
And behind the support, it is also Rokid's belief that there is a sea of stars.
Rokid is doing something big
This is not the first time that Rokid has held an AR app development contest. In January 2023, the first AR application development competition held by Rokid came to an end, and during the three-and-a-half-month competition, Rokid provided all-round support for the award-winning developers, including funding, hardware support, publicity and promotion, technical support, and start-up support.
Not everyone understands what Rokid is doing, after all, in the consumer AR glasses market, other manufacturers are still more willing to rely on the ecology of smartphones and personal computers at this stage, obediently make a simple head-mounted display, stay in the comfort zone and wait for the AR ecology to mature.
But Rokid understands that if you just wait for the AR ecosystem to mature, "success" must be more inclined to large companies with deep pockets than startups, as Misa said in an interview, "Startups like Rokid can't wait, we wait until everyone else is successful, there will be nothing to do with you, so we must move forward." 」
After a year, we saw the finals of the Rokid AR Ecological Conference and the 2nd AR Application Development Competition.
The conference opened
On-site user experience
More than 300 investors, government officials, enterprises, universities, and individual developers, including Ye Jun, President of DingTalk, and Zhang Junbo, CEO of Unity China, attended the conference. Rokid also continued to increase its efforts, bringing in Unity, a world-renowned 3D engine manufacturer, and Agora, the pioneer of global real-time interactive APIs, to jointly provide technical support and product suggestions for AR developers, and at the same time increased the prize scale of the AR application development competition to 500,000 yuan, and the maximum prize for a single award was 100,000 yuan.
At the end of the competition, Misa also promised that the prize size of the third AR application development competition will be at least doubled next year, and the AR investment fund led by Rokid has been successfully filed, and will also be able to support more excellent AR development teams.
Roxid d.o
Rokid's determination to promote the AR ecosystem does not seem to waver in the slightest.
Of course, as a platform company, Rokid also understands that the core role of the platform is to provide good services for developers, including technical support and docking with users, so that developers can give full play to their creativity, and then finally meet the needs of users through the Rokid AR Studio platform.
ES 应用「发光」,Rokid「发电」
After all, "ecology" is not just a metaphysical concept. Just as ecology is a collective term for all organisms and environments that interact with each other in a given environment, in the context of a personal computing platform, ecology includes both hardware devices and operating systems, as well as more concrete applications and experiences.
That's why when I get rid of the perspective of a media person and experience the conference again as an ordinary consumer, I will find that what I actually see is the application and the experience they bring to Rokid AR glasses:
In "It's Stretching Time", I move my cervical spine to the rhythm of the game;
In "Walking in the Light", I found a virtual pet that runs and exercises together, and I can also record running data synchronously;
In the sandbox battle game "AR Finger War", I came to a "Chu River Han Realm Dispute" through the kneading between my fingers.
Different from the 2D content and applications I saw in consumer-grade AR glasses, in these applications, I once again deeply felt the unique interaction and experience in the era of spatial computing. When virtual scenes and things are vividly and vividly displayed in front of you in the form of 3D, and you interact with them through the most natural gestures and voices, you can obviously experience a completely different interactive experience from the touch screen in the smartphone era and the keyboard and mouse in the PC era.
No, strictly speaking, more natural and vivid.
And more importantly, there are already a considerable number of real · AR applications, and in the foreseeable future, Rokid will also be the most concerned and valuable spatial computing platform for developers.
Take PixelHack, a retro pixel-style online shooter that won a silver award and a Agora Best App award in this year's AR App Development Competition. On the Rokid AR Studio platform based on the OST (optical fluoroscopy) solution, developers use the convenience of Unity development and Agora real-time interactive API access to greatly improve development efficiency, but the more core aspect is to deeply integrate the spatial computing capabilities of Rokid AR Studio.
Based on the spatial operating system carried on Rokid AR Studio - YodaOS-Master, Rokid has comprehensively reshaped the operating system for the interaction needs of AR glasses, with the help of an RGB single camera to achieve 6DoF SLAM positioning and 3D gesture recognition, and both have the advantages of high precision, real-time and stability, and are also equipped with voice interaction capabilities, which can realize the core combination of virtual and real and natural interaction in spatial computing.
Thanks to the performance of the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen1, Rokid's 6DoF SLAM can achieve centimeter-level positioning accuracy, with a drift of less than 0.5%, and 3D gesture recognition also has centimeter-level fitting accuracy, with a gesture detection rate of more than 99%, and the algorithm's single-frame detection is less than 10 milliseconds. At the same time, Rokid has also put a lot of effort into the algorithm to improve the efficiency and performance of the system, so that the overall system energy consumption ratio is well optimized.
On the other hand, Rokid is also trying to lower the development threshold as much as possible, improve development efficiency, and help developers solve most of the problems in advance. In addition to Rokid's own UXR2.0 SDK, Rokid also officially supports XR technology standards such as OpenXR and MRTK, promoting the underlying algorithms and capabilities to more open ecosystems, making it easy for developers to use and access.
Therefore, to a certain extent, developers can only efficiently create "PixelHack" and more excellent and creative AR applications on the Rokid AR Studio platform, and reach a large number of AR glasses users through Rokid AR Studio.
And it's not just consumer-grade applications. In fact, at this conference, I also saw the enterprise-level application of Rokid AR Studio in a large number of scenarios such as remote after-sales, equipment inspection, smart medical care, and smart cockpit, including "Closed Thorax Drainage AR Teaching", which won the CEO Special Award.
Write at the end
One of the important reasons why Misa stuck with me at the conference was that Rokid insisted on holding the AR App Development Competition, and one of the important reasons was that AR developers could focus on the development of AR applications without worrying about income.
On the one hand, the reality of this passage is that the AR application ecosystem is still in its early stages, and even the cultivation of AR developer groups is still in a "pioneering period". But the other side of this passage also shows once again that Rokid is trying his best to promote the development of the AR ecosystem, not only for its own growth, but also for the development of the entire industry.
Rokid's ecosystem strategy means that they are not just promoting their own platform, but building a comprehensive platform that will benefit all AR developers, ordinary users, and the entire AR industry by cultivating AR developers and encouraging AR application development.
It's also time to revisit AR.
In the past decade, the AR technological revolution has experienced ups and downs, but the industry has never given up on the exploration of product paradigms and the improvement of experience and technology.
With the debut of Apple's Vision Pro and the release of Rokid AR Studio last year, the arrival of personal space computing platforms has shown that AR is ushering in a key inflection point. It is difficult to expect AR glasses to leap into the mainstream in a short period of time, but there is no doubt that without the development of an independent AR application ecosystem, the future of AR can only be a flash in the pan.
At the meeting, Misa, the founder of Rokid, also revealed another key information, they will release an important new product at OpenDay in the first half of this year, I believe that on this new product, we will also see Rokid bring everyone a better AR experience and deeper thinking about the era of spatial computing.