Google tackles augmented reality, unveils new platform

Google has unveiled ARCore — a platform for building augmented reality apps on Android. Image: https://developers.google.com/ar/discover/ via AFP Relaxnews

Hot on the heels of Apple — which released its first-ever attempt at an augmented reality platform a few months ago at WWDC (“ARKit”) — fellow tech giant Google has now unleashed its own incarnation, for Android users.

The company, which boasts more than two billion active Android devices globally, on Tuesday unveiled a preview of its mobile-based AR platform “ARCore” for developers, which it hopes will bring “augmented reality capabilities to existing and future Android phones” around the world.

While Google has been developing the fundamental technologies that power mobile AR over the last three years with Tango, ARCore works without any additional hardware, which means it can scale across the Android ecosystem.

According to Google, ARCore will run on millions of devices, starting with the Pixel and Samsung’s S8, running 7.0 Nougat and above, with the company targeting 100 million devices at the end of the preview.

Find out more about ARCore through its site: https://developers.google.com/ar/. JB

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