Following the release of Vuforia SDK we wanted to talk to Qualcomm's VP of Product Management Jay Wright to get a better understanding of the SDK and what it enables.

The video that we posted in our original report got our attention and we decided to investigate further.  

We managed to talk to Jay and learn a number of ingesting things about Vuforia. Many will like to know that the SDK is not limited to Adreno GPUs, but it doesn’t hurt if you have one. Developers will program for Eclipse OpenGL ES or a plug-in for the Unity engine. Both approaches support a variety of GPUs, including competing products. 

Samsung Galaxy Gear VR and Lego

Jay is very excited about Oculus and Samsung's Gear VR, as they managed to combine augmented reality and virtual reality all in one device. Jay has a very high opinion of Gear VR and he has encouraged us to get our hands on it. He believes Samsung did a great job with this device.

It turns out that augmented reality is one of a cool things that actually works on most of our phones already. Lego was one of the first companies who successfully merged a virtual world with augmented reality. In its latest app and physical game called Fusion, Lego gets kids to build something outside of the game and then scan it in the game with a tablet. For example, if there is a fire in the game and you need a firehouse to put the fire down, the kid or a supervising adult has to build a physical firehouse from the Lego bricks and scan it into the game.

You get to build castles, houses and even race cars that you have to build in the real world. Lego is thriving and the game has picked up a lot of attention.

Lego will launch four Lego Fusion products for the US market - Town Master, Battle Towers, Create & Race and Resort Designer. Each of these physical kits is selling for $34.99 each, while the games are free. Parents seem to love the game and so do kids.

Lego is one of the first adopters. The Guinness Book of World Records also supports Vuforia driven VR in its latest edition and we can imagine that companies like IKEA will start building catalogues that will make your furniture pop out when scanned using a tablet or phone.