Discoverability and Your Experience Service

By default, when Vuforia View scans a ThingMark, it queries the Global Experience Index (GXI) to find Experiences that are associated with that ThingMark. For more information about the GXI, see Core Components and Concepts.

In this case, the list of Experiences that are displayed in Vuforia View only includes Experiences from Experience Services that are discoverable.

To be discoverable, an Experience Service must be registered in the Global Experience Index (GXI). Being discoverable does not imply that the experience content is accessible without authentication. When the user selects a discovered experience, they may or may not be prompted to authenticate depending on how access for that experience has been configured. For more information about access control, see User Management and Access Control.

The sections below describe how to configure your Experience Service to be discoverable or non-discoverable.

As noted, to be discoverable, an Experience Service must be registered in the GXI. For more information on registering your Experience Service in the GXI, see Register Your Experience Service in the GXI.

When an Experience Service is registered with the GXI, it is assigned a unique domain ID. The domain ID determines which ThingMarks prompt the GXI to find Experiences hosted by that Experience Service. For example, assume that an Experience Service running on host es.example.com has been assigned domain ID 1234. When Vuforia View scans a ThingMark for Domain 1234 (for example, 1234:78), the GXI queries the Experience Service running on the host es.example.com for the list of Experiences associated with ThingMark 1234:78.

To register an Experience Service with the GXI, contact PTC.

Registering the Experience Service with the GXI is a necessary but not sufficient condition to make the Experience Service discoverable. Besides registering with the GXI, the URLs used to access the Experience Service must:

This does not imply that the Experience Service must use the secure HTTPS protocol and be directly accessible on the public Internet. Instead, the Experience Service could be deployed behind a proxy. In this case, the proxy must use the secure HTTPS protocol and be directly accessible on the public internet.

By default, a newly installed Experience Service is not registered in the GXI and is therefore not discoverable. In this case, Vuforia View can only access Experiences hosted by that Experience Service if it is configured to query that Experience Service directly for Experiences. To configure Vuforia View to query an Experience Service directly for Experiences you can do one of the following:

• Set the Experience Service For Studio setting in Vuforia View equal to the base URL for the Experience Service (for example, https://es.example.com).

• Scan the QR in Vuforia Studio using Vuforia View. You can find the QR code by navigating to CONFIGURATION > Info in the PROJECT pane.

Besides configuring this property, Vuforia View must also be able to connect to the Experience Service. This means that the Experience Service must be accessible on the public Internet or Vuforia View must be connected to the same internal network on which the Experience Service is running.

Depending on your requirements, you may or may not choose to make your production server discoverable and federated. It is recommended that development and test deployments not be discoverable or federated. Leaving your development and test systems undiscoverable allows you to keep these systems behind your company’s firewall and allows you to use the same ThingMarks during development and test what is used in production.

Configuring your development and test systems to be unfederated prevents production Experiences from being discovered and confused with non-production Experiences during development and testing activities.