The wide variety of Android smartphones on the market places more challenges on Google, who have to figure out how to adapt the technology to a vast number of phonebrands with different specific parts.
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Apple, meanwhile, unveiled iOS 11 in June, with augmented reality (AR) being one of its core features. Clay Bavor, Google’s head of AR and VR, confirmed that Tango had fulfilled its objective and that the new platform was the future. So, what’s the difference between Tango and ARCore? It’s meant to be more accessible.
“We’re targeting 100 million devices at the end of the preview”, Burke writes.
Here’s what you need to know.
Google is no stranger to augmented reality, but its experiments so far haven’t quite reached critical mass. But major companies are now embracing it, so everyone’s talking about it. Just ask HoloLens users and Pokemon Go players. Google and Microsoft have already experimented with AR glasses.
ARCore leverages native integration with Unity 2017.2 Beta 9 and higher, enabling Unity developers to build AR experiences for Android devices, as well as add AR to existing Android apps.
ARCore is created to work on millions of existing Android devices and does not require special depth sensors or dual cameras.
Everyone seems to be across the board with their predictions for how Apple will fair with their latest iPhone launch (es) this fall.
The key is that, unlike Google’s past efforts, no special hardware will be required to run those apps beyond the standard camera built into most smartphones.
What will happen to Google Tango? The answer? It’ll adapt Tango for everyday consumer phones without the extra cameras.
Reality check: ARCore may be bad news for Asus and its new Zenfone AR, which will now be less special, but it’s great news for everyone else.
But Tango isn’t dead. More importantly, ARCore is geared to work on any Android phone, not just Tango-equipped devices. It is optimized for motion tracking to determine the position and orientation of a phone as it moves, environmental understanding for detecting horizontal surfaces, and light estimation to make virtual objects blend in with the lighting of a room.
As Apple prepares a massive update to its iPhone operating system created to thrust augmented reality into the mainstream, Google is hatching its own plan to get augmented reality apps on millions of Android phones by next year.
Bavor told The Verge that the level of “quality, the capability, the things it can do” will be “several levels above the other solutions out there”.
Tim Merel, managing director of technology consulting firm Digi-Capital, believes Apple’s entry into AR will catalyze the field. The new Apple ARKit is expected to be available later this year. The first ARCore-enabled devices are the Pixel and the Samsung S8, which run on Android 7.0 Nougat.
Google’s ARCore literally loads to an Android device with the name “Tango Core”.
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The ARCore SDK is available to developers starting now.
