According to Variety, the much-awaited augmented reality technology (AR) for Android can be unveiled by Google in the coming week, on the occasion of the Mobile World Congress, taking place in Barcelona. Good has built all these AR developments around the Google ARCore framework, which is expected to let third-party developers introduce AR apps for Android devices.
The ARCore was announced by Google back in August 2017. It is already tested in Google’s Pixel phones. Primarily, Google has set a target of introducing ARCore in 100 million phones by March 2018 with the help of their key Android partners. Google is yet to make any official announcement.
Samsung’s Galaxy flagship phones are expected to be among the first devices to receive the ARCore update. Samsung & Google have been working together for the past year with the sole ambition of providing “immersive new experiences for consumers”. According to our reports, a recent developer preview version of ARCore has already been run on Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+ and Galaxy Note8, and Samsung S8.
It all started with Apple announcing their interest in the AR technology and unveiled the idea of ARKit at the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June 2017. Since then Mobile AR has been one of the most discussed topics. Both ARCore and ARKit use quite a similar approach to instill augmented reality to mobile phones. The technology uses the phone sensors including the phone camera to map the surroundings and then to track the position of a phone, making it very much possible to show the virtual objects on top of a phone’s camera view. These virtual objects behave exactly like their real counterparts. If we go closer to a particular AR object, it will become bigger; if we move it, its shadow will also move.
As mentioned earlier, this technology has already been used by Google in their own Pixel phones, allowing users to shoot videos with virtual stormtroopers. Though two developer preview versions of the technology are already released, the third-party developers aren’t yet allowed to publish their ARCore apps on the Play Store. The uploads will be allowed once the upcoming ARCore 1.0 is released.
Before ARCore, Google had introduced Tango. Tango is an experimental technology. It was introduced on a small number of phones with advanced camera sensors. Google will terminate the support for Tango at the end of March. The Tango developers are instructed to focus on ARCore.
