As the long awaited Mobile World Congress which is scheduled to be in Barcelona next week draws closer, close sources from the company have revealed that Google is ready to make a major push to bring augmented reality technology (AR) to Android at the event.
Google has been working on this project as far back as August and since then, it has tested preview versions of the technology on its own Pixel phones. Also, the release of the company’s ARCore framework will allow third-party developers to bring AR apps to Android phones. Google has always dreamed of bringing ARCore to 100 million phones in the near future.
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The company plans to realize this dream by bringing ARCore to Android phones by March. One of the first key android partners to show interest in ARcore is Samsung, after making an announcement last year with Google that they were working together to bring “immersive new experiences for consumers” to Samsung phones, including the Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+ and Galaxy Note8, and Samsung S8 phones already run a recent developer preview version of ARCore.
Augmented Reality technology in mobile phones seems to be gaining much attention. Apple revealed in June at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) that it’s mobile phone AR is ARKit. ARkit and ARcore function almost in the same manner to bring augmented reality to mobile phones: Making use of a phone’s camera together with other phone sensors, these technologies map a room and then track the position of a phone within that room.
This makes it possible to place virtual objects on top of a phone’s camera view of a given room, and then have these virtual objects behave like real objects would. When you go closer to an AR object, it becomes bigger. Move it, and its shadow moves as well.
Google recently used this technology on its own Pixel phones to let people take videos with virtual stormtroopers. The company also released two developer preview versions of the technology, but hasn’t allowed third-party developers to publish their ARCore apps on the Play Store yet. It will open the floodgates for ARCore apps on the Play Store coinciding with the upcoming release of ARCore 1.0.
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Google has been working on mobile AR technology for some time. ARCore was preceded by Tango, an experimental technology that only ran on a small number of phones with advanced camera sensors. The company recently announced that it would end support for Tango at the end of March, and now plans to tell Tango developers to focus on ARCore instead.