Last year at re:invent 2017, Amazon unveiled Amazon Sumerian, a toolkit for easily creating AR, VR, and 3D apps. Now Amazon has open-sourced it to allow all developers to create compelling virtual environments and scenes for their AR, VR, and 3D apps without having to acquire or master specialized tools.
The open sourcing of Amazon Sumerian comes as a part of Amazon’s strategy to expand its reach and revenues by offering its cloud services to the largest number of developers, startups, and organizations as possible.
As Kyle Roche, the GM of Amazon Sumerian, puts it “We are targeting enterprises who don’t have the talent in-house. Tackling new tech can sometimes be too overwhelming, and this is one way of getting inspiration or prototypes going. Sumerian is a stable way to bootstrap ideas and start conversations. There is a huge business opportunity here.”
Most importantly, with Amazon Sumerian, you don’t necessarily need 3D graphics or programming experience to build rich, interactive VR and AR scenes. And hence, open sourcing Sumerian will only give it more traction from both non-developers, and trained professionals alike.
Amazon Sumerian is equipped with multiple user-friendly features.
- Editor: A web-based editor for constructing 3D scenes, importing assets, scripting interactions, and special effects, with cross-platform publishing.
- Object Library: a library of pre-built objects and templates.
- Asset Import: Upload 3D assets to use in your scene. Sumerian supports importing FBX, OBJ, and Unity projects.
- Scripting Library: provides a JavaScript scripting library via its 3D engine for advanced scripting capabilities.
- Hosts: animated, lifelike 3D characters that can be customized for gender, voice, and language.
Amazon Sumerian also has baked in integration with Amazon Polly and Amazon Lex to add speech and natural language into Sumerian hosts. Additionally, the scripting library can be used with AWS Lambda allowing the use of the full range of AWS services.
The VR and AR apps created using Sumerian ca run in browsers that support WebGL or WebVR and on popular devices such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and those powered by iOS or Android.
You can learn more details by visiting the Amazon Sumerian homepage and browsing through Sumerian Tutorials.
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