Let me start by stating how happy I am to make my first post to our official blog! Despite it has been really busy and interesting start of the year 2011, our Kanzi® middleware is now used to create the world’s first real Stereoscopic 3D Android Homescreen replacement. This beauty was demonstrated at Computex 2011 with MasterImage3D. The popular site TV Hexus was the first one to release the real video of an actual 3D Android Homescreen we made (http://tv.hexus.net/show/2011/06/Rightware_talks_3D_user_interfaces/ ).
We are getting loads of inquiries about the actual implementation and how it links to Android itself. In order to understand this, the first fact to take into account is that Kanzi® is a real middleware, which means it has not been tied it to any specific platform –- it’s still cross-platform solution for creating 3D user interfaces for any platform having OpenGL ES support. Compared to many of our competitors, we designed Kanzi to provide the world’s fastest graphics engine for embedded environments and the 3D user interface framework with tools to ease the creation process of these next generation UIs. By providing a real middleware we wanted to make sure that our customers can have as much customization as possible on the software stack level as well: they can plug-in their own font solutions, physics engines or any other solution they have.
The coolest thing from software perspective in Kanzi® is that you can embed it within your existing solutions as well. We want to provide the best performing visualization for 3D UIs, but there is a lot more in user interfaces than that. Many of our customers have been really happy to start using Kanzi® because they don’t need to throw away their existing software stack, they can even run their old 2D pipeline in parallel with Kanzi®. This kind of hybrid solution allows our customers to start creating new products immediately, i.e. add some 3D content through Kanzi®, but keep most of the old user interface still intact. This way they can rapidly start prototyping and getting actual feedback by the end users of the use of 3D in their user interface. Thus improving the time-to-market!
Now, let’s get back to how we link to Android. Kanzi® Engine is a purely written in ANSI-C , which means it runs on Android’s Native side. Once developer wants to visualize the content on Android side the command will be directed to Kanzi® Engine which directly talks with the drivers without having Java layer between providing extremely fast and customizable memory handling and function execution. This process doesn’t require us to change anything in Android framework, only to provide bindings to Java layer, meaning we can basically run on any Android version. To take an example, the Stereoscopic 3D Android Homescreen did not require us to change anything from the Android framework, actually, it is just a normal Android application! Cool, huh? This means we can run it on for example on Samsung Galaxy S or HTC Desire Z as well as in any 2.x or 3.0 Android versions.
For our customers this means that they can decide the depth of integration to Android framework. So, if they don’t want to integrate any deeper, they don’t need to worry about supporting different Android versions, or integrating to new version. Also, they can even provide the 3D API for their developer community to create even beyond astonishing applications for their phones!
Thanks and Best Regards,
Arto