KDDI Teams with Total Immersion for Powerful AR Development

Photo: Impress.co.jp

Today Japan’s second largest telecom, KDDI (34 million subscribers), announced its strategic partnership with French Augmented Realityleader, Total Immersion.

Beginning immediately KDDI (TYO:9433) is opening up its “SATCH” SDK, a kit intended for developing advanced mobile augmented reality experiences. The SDK is based on Total Immersion’s D’Fusion technology and boasts features such as image recognition and markerless tracking, including face tracking.

Already the telecom has developed content for several major brands like Suntory and Glico. The SDK will be further be available for free to 3,000 content providers in total.

Currently the technical documentation online is only partially available in Japanese. API details and the authoring guide remain in English. This will slow initial adoption until KDDI can release a full SDK translation.

Followers of KDDI’s strategic partnerships may be wondering what this means for the telecom’s other AR partner, Tonchidot and its Sekai Camera application. In KDDI’s formal press releases there was no mention of its other partnership.

It may at first seem to be a conflict of interest for Tonchidot to have KDDI promoting another AR SDK. However, a macro assessment of Sekai Camera’s approach to AR and the SATCH SDK quickly reveals major strategic differences which may allow the two technologies to coexist under KDDI’s roof. Namely, Sekai Camera exists as an app with a relatively easy to implement SDK explicitly intended for content presentation within the Sekai Camera app. The SATCH SDK is app agnostic and, while can be more technically involved, is far more capable. As a result, the two technologies serve mostly different purposes.

See the below demo reel to glimpse samples of what content providers can build with the SATCH SDK.

[via KDDI, photo from Impress.co.jp]