Huawei ties up with Wikitude GmbH for Smartphone Application
Huawei’s Sonic and IDEOS X3 to have Wikitude Augmented Reality on its Home ScreenHuawei Technologies Co. Ltd. announced a strategic partnership with Wikitude GmbH, the creators of the world’s first mobile augmented reality (AR) browser. Huawei’s Sonic and IDEOS X3 Device, which has been recently launched in the Indian market, will have this spectacular application loaded in it. With this tie up, Huawei customers can benefit from this first publicly available application using a location-based approach to Augmented Reality.
The all new Wikitude World Browser 6.3 for Android is fully optimized for the Sonic and IDEOS X3 handsets. The application offers a direct view of reality in an "enhanced" way. It displays information about the users' surroundings through the smartphone’s camera, enabling them to see the reality with additional computer generated content on top of it.
Confirming the news, Mr. Anand Narang, Marketing Director at Huawei Devices said, “We are extremely pleased to partner with Wikitude for this innovative application. The Wikitude World Browser will allow our users to discover what’s around them in a completely new manner. Huawei who is known for its innovation always aims to provide the best combination of good design and superb user experience to its mobile users. We look forward for a positive response from our valuable users for the newly launched smartphones Sonic and IDEOS X3 which has many other exciting applications like Wikitude loaded in it.”
Wikitude World Browser 6.3 features more than 2,000 AR content experiences. These aggregated content datasets add up to more than 150 million points of interest (POIs) like sights, restaurants, mobile coupons, coffee shops and WiFi hotspots around the globe. Wikitude also allows the users to customize the home screen according to individual’s lifestyle and preferences.
Wikitude offers more than 2 million POIs in India. Some of the content in Indiaincludes: Twitter (geo referenced tweets), Flickr, Instagram, Panoramio and Youtube (geo referenced pictures and videos), Foursquare Venues, Google Local, Wikipedia articles, hotels.com, booking.com and more.
Most of the POIs are in the major cities including Mumbai,New Delhi,Bangalore, Hyderabad etc.
“It is absolutely phenomenal that we were able to engage with Huawei on optimizing Wikitude for a smartphone with cloud services” said Andy Gstoll, Wikitude’s CMO. “Huawei's lifestyle oriented devices in combination with Wikitude make Augmented Reality possible without any compromises.” He further added, “Due to Huawei's very competitively priced handsets, Augmented Reality is now available to a much wider audience than ever before."
Wikitude has been voted "Best Augmented Reality Browser" three times in a row for 2009, 2010 and most recently for 2011 by the readers of Augmented Planet, one of the most popular international AR blogs.
For more information on the awards, please visit: http://www.wikitude.com/team/awards
About Wikitude
Wikitude GmbH are the creators of the world’s first mobile augmented reality (AR) browser and the company behind the internationally renowned Wikitude World Browser for iOS, Android, Symbian and BlackBerry devices. The AR platform has been voted “Best Augmented Reality Browser” three years in a row: 2009, 2010 and 2011. Wikitude is leading the international AR technology standardization chairing the working group in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OCG). More information on Wikitude here: www.wikitude.com