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 is deeply integrated with Unity AR Foundation.

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Visual Positioning System

Shared AR

Real-time meshing

Semantic segmentation

Map Tiles

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 – in seconds. Lightship VPS is available in public beta within Lightship ARDK.

Learn more about Lightship VPS

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 10 users
Peer-to-peer messaging with provided server
Lightweight gaming functions
Session authentication and encryption
Co-localization with Shared AR and VPS

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 meshing includes:

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

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
Object detection with over 200 categories

Build with maps optimized for AR

Guide your AR experience with Lightship Maps, easy-to-use, customizable basemaps built specifically for augmented reality.

Learn more about Lightship Maps

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Lightship ARDK?

How is Lightship ARDK different from other AR development kits?

ARDK’s features are fully platform-agnostic, which lets you write an AR application once and have it work across Android and iOS devices (no platform-specific code).
ARDK’s high fidelity occlusion leverages depth that does not require LiDAR, enabling virtual content to interact realistically with the physical environment on a wider range of devices. Depth sensing is instant, even on moving objects.
ARDK provides Shared AR, a fully managed multiplayer service that can co-localize up to 10 players. This allows users to see the same AR content in real time, using VPS or Image Targets.
ARDK provides real-time meshing of the world at long distances. Whereas LiDAR-based meshing stops at 5-7 meters, ours is able to create collision and navigation meshes that extend up to 40 meters from the user at run time.
ARDK recognizes and provides per pixel masks for a large set of environmental characteristics (water, buildings, grass, foliage, for example). It also provides object detection bounding boxes for over 200 classes.
ARDK provide tools optimized for rapidly iterating on real-world AR experiences directly within Unity Editor. Playback lets you build your experience around looping video of key locations so you don’t need to deploy then test at the location. Simulation runs our algorithms directly in Unity Editor, letting you move the camera within your test environment. Finally, Geospatial Browser lets you find VPS-acivated locations to deploy your location-based AR experiences to, as well as download meshes of those locations to import into Unity to author content against.

What platforms does Lightship ARDK work with?

How do I get started with ARDK?