What is Vuforia?
Vuforia is PTC’s enterprise-level Augmented Reality (AR) product suite and one of the best industrial augmented reality platforms. It offers a range of Augmented Reality and Extended Reality applications, some of which are designed to solve critical business problems such as the growing skill gaps amongst workers, the transfer of knowledge, remote assistance and improving inspection processes. The remaining products are more akin to that of a sandbox environment, offering up multiple different tools and allowing you to create your own solutions to solve your own business needs.
PTC acquired the class-leading AR technology from Qualcomm back in 2015 and it is still regarded as one of the best in its class. It offers excellent tracking, ease of use and it is cross-platform, unlike some of its rivals ARKit and ARCore.
The Products
Vuforia Engine
Vuforia Engine offers you the ability to create cross-platform, custom branded AR applications. The advanced computer vision technology enables the placement of digital content seamlessly into a real-world environment.
Vuforia Studio
Vuforia Studio is the fastest and easiest platform to Augmenting your engineering data. Effortlessly leverage your existing CAD and IoT data in order to create and deliver detailed work instructions, guidance and training to your front line workers. Studio offers an intuitive user interface that anyone can pick up and start creating.
Vuforia Chalk
Vuforia Chalk offers AR-powered remote assistance. Easily annotate and mark up the physical environment over live video calls with colleagues, customers, end-users and front line workers. Annotating the world and guiding users through complex processes couldn’t be easier.
Vuforia Expert Capture
Vuforia Expert Capture is a tool for capturing and sharing your expert’s knowledge within the business. It can dramatically reduce the time to capture, document and distribute key business procedures amongst your workforce. And leveraging Augmented Reality can dramatically increase onboarding, learning and knowledge retention.
Vuforia Instruct
Vuforia instruct combines Augmented Reality and 3D CAD to create clear and immersive inspection procedures. Leveraging Augmented Reality workers are guided through inspections by clearly identifying what the user should be doing and where they should be doing it. Cloud analytics also offers a clear insight into the results of each inspection.
Vuforia Spatial Toolbox
Vuforia Spatial Toolbox is an open-source project that enables you to build, configure and change how systems work in context through the power of augmented reality.
Is Vuforia for me?
With PTC at its core is embedded in the engineering and manufacturing world, it is clear that the product offerings within the Vuforia suite are heavily positioned and tailored to that environment. The likes of expert capture and instruct offer very little use to those outside of an industrial or business setting, however, a product like Vuforia Engine really can be leveraged by anyone and there are some fantastic use cases of it being used outside of the Engineering and manufacturing world.
Depending on whether you are a solo developer or engineering director I believe PTC has a product that will fit your Augmented reality needs.
Get in touch
Want to find out more about Vuforia – the best industrial augmented reality platform or how AR can help your business grow, contact one of our experts.
Read about our customer, G.U.N.T and how augmented reality increased their efficiency and effectiveness in training. Read the full story.
