Recently I wrote about the possible impact of ARKit on the augmented reality market. We didn’thave to wait long for the first effects, the ARCore.
What is ARCore ?
ARCore is a platform for building augmented reality applications on Android. That sounds like a very good slogan, so let us try a bit simpler.
ARCore is nothing more than a set of tools that handles the most complex operation for the programmer, it brings AR capabilities to a wide audience.
ARCore does not need any special equipment, it uses standard camera in your phone to bring AR to life. It focuses on three main elements:
ARCore is nothing more than a set of tools that handles the most complex operation for the programmer, it brings AR capabilities to a wide audience.
ARCore does not need any special equipment, it uses standard camera in your phone to bring AR to life. It focuses on three main elements:
1. Motion tracking – phone can understand and track its position relative to the world
2. Environment understanding – phone can detect the size and location of horizontal surfaces
3. Light estimation – phone can estimate the environment current lightning conditions
All this combined, gives us a lot of new possibilities on Android phones.
Limitation
On current stage it is hard to talk about limitation. For sure the biggest problem is the small number of supported devices. At the moment of writing this article, only three phones are officially supported: Pixel, Pixel XL and Samsung Galaxy S8. Why S8+ or Note 8 are not supported ? Only Google knows. The amount of devices should increase with time as Google is talking with other producers. We will see.
In terms of software limitation as I wrote it is hard to say. Currently it is even hard to find any interesting NEW project based on ARCore beside those officially introduced along with the information about ARCore. For sure possibilities are big, but how big, where do they end, those are the big questions. Again, we need to wait to get the answer on that.
What next ?
What can we do ? We need to wait and observe. I`m guessing that in short time we will see a lot of interesting tests done by individual programmers and companies. Those ideas, concepts, prototypes will show us how far we can go with the current version, what we can build with ARCore, will it be a good and true answer to Apple ARKit. I hope so. At the moment we have those two players on the field but we can’t forget about Facebook and their plans to invest 3 billion dollars in the AR platform. And of course we have Microsoft with the HoloLens. For sure thanks to Google and Apple, augmented reality is getting wider audience, people see that this technology carries huge possibilities. This can bring the demand and every time when there is a demand someone need to satisfy it. For sure we are standing in front of huge milestone for the augmented reality.
There is a trade off in affordability. The reason Android is a good choice is that it works well on phones under $100. The reason we have phones under $100 is due to the omission of certain sensors. One primarily being a magnetometer. That sensor is essential to any attempt at immersive XR or AR. Unless the manufacturers wake up and realize this, it won't make a lick of difference whether we use Tango or AR Core. Apple will eat Google's lunch.
ReplyDeleteI've done some research. As far as I know ARCore does not need any special hardware so it is possible to run on phones under $100. The problem that we have with limited phones is related with the fact that for each device there is a need of performing a manual calibration that is quite costly. Apple on the other does not have this problem because they have limited amount of phone models. So we are facing two different worlds. We also can assume that in near future we will have much bigger access to devices that can run ARCore out of the box
Deletep.s. Sorry for late response :)