Innovations in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have become strong tech trends in recent years and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is trying to bring these into the mainstream by helping developers design immersive VR, AR and 3D environments.
At the AWS re:Invent Conference in Las Vegas this week, the company unveiled Amazon Sumerian, which is aimed at making it easier for developers to build VR, AR and 3D applications, and run them on mobile devices like smartphones, head-mounted displays, digital signage or Web browsers.
"The technology for AR and VR is not that complicated. It's very well understood, but there are lots of barriers for making it easy for people to use," said Adam Fitzgerald, head of worldwide developer marketing for AWS, speaking to ITWeb in an interview on the side-lines of the conference.
AWS has seen that in many industries there has been an adoption of VR and AR technologies to build realistic virtual environments or overlay virtual objects on the real world, for a range of applications. These include training simulations, virtual concierge services, enhanced online shopping experiences and virtual house or land tours.
"While there is going to be continued innovation on the device sets for people, there are going to be different headsets produced and there are going to be lots of people that might incorporate it into building games or building walk-through experiences for architecture or engineering and all of these other opportunities ? the truth was that there was no simple way to do all of those things," Fitzgerald explained.
AWS says creating realistic virtual environments has traditionally been a complex process for developers.
"Customers across industries see the potential of VR and AR technologies for a wide range of uses ? from educating and training employees to creating new customer experiences. But, customers are daunted and overwhelmed by the up-front investment in specialised skills and tools required to even get started building a VR or AR application," says Marco Argenti, VP for technology at AWS.
Sumerian allows developers to "build realistic virtual environments, populate them with 3D objects and animated characters and script how they interact with each other and the application's users".
"The business opportunity that AWS often looks for is where is there some technical complexity that is inhibiting our customers' potential creativity, and AR and VR is exactly one of those. So it made a lot of sense for the business to think about that," Fitzgerald noted.
"We think that by building this primitive building block that takes away some of the complexity and undifferentiated heavy lifting from that space, we can build a compelling product that will unleash innovation across our customers and that's the driving force for Sumerian."
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