Amazon looks to tackle yet another industry with its new AR/VR development platform.

Amazon has basically sent many brick and mortar traditions out to the retirement home. Recently they have even jumped into brick and mortar by acquiring Whole Foods.  Due to the pushes by Amazon, even ancient traditions like going to the store on Black Friday have gone the way of Denver the Last Dinosaur. 

Well, Amazon is finally placing its hat into the kooky world of VR and AR with its new development platform. 

Amazon Sumerian provides tools and resources that allows anyone to create and run augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and 3D applications with ease.  With Sumerian, you can build multi-platform experiences that run on hardware like the Oculus, HTC Vive, and iOS devices using WebVR compatible browsers and with support for ARCore on Android devices coming soon.

This exciting new service, currently in preview, delivers features to allow you to design highly immersive and interactive 3D experiences from your browser. Some of these features are:

• 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 coming soon 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.
• AWS Services Integration: baked in integration with Amazon Polly and Amazon Lex to add speech and natural language to into Sumerian hosts. Additionally, the scripting library can be used with AWS Lambda allowing use of the full range of AWS services.

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