Google’s latest AR project, called ARCore, is released and functioning. Its first AR project Tango has been thusly killed, according to an announcement via a tweet saying that the support will be shut down on March 1 next year.
Google stepped into AR majorly via the Tango project that took care of position tracking with loads of hardware. The Tango devices usually packed a full Xbox Kinect infused within a smartphone rear. It further had extra sensors offering a 3K content view that was basically used for a few AR games.
Lenovo Phab 2 Pro was the first Project Tango device but was expensive, slow, unattractive, and with poor battery life. Asus Zenphone AR was the second and last device of the project, merely having a bit of hardware upgrade.
An extra hardware upgrade was never sufficient for apps monitored by the Tango Project, and games suffered low install base.
Focusing back to the present ARCore of Google, it doesn’t support the 3D view but can provide positional tracking as well as Tango without extra hardware. Only the Galaxy S8 and the Pixel phones support ARCore for now, but Google aims to reach a target of 100 million users by this winter. The latest release, Developer Preview 2 is out today.
Google is infusing ARCore-powered apps on Pixel phones, first expanding broadly on the entirely new AR Stickers mode for the camera. Star Wars and Stranger Things characters were licensed by Google for the mode, which the company is advertising heavily lately.
On an inferring note, a part of the Tango Project still lives in ARCore in the form of SDK. The technology inclined to hardware is living on in a tracking technology of Google called WorldSense, being built for standalone VR headsets.
