Google shows off stunning new AR features coming to web and mobile apps soon
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/20999646/google-arcore-augmented-reality-updates-occlusion-physics-depth
Reported today in The Verge.
Google shows off stunning new AR features coming to web and mobile apps soon
Google has been quietly working to improve its augmented reality platform, ARCore, since its official launch early last year. Now, the company says its ready to unveil some of the next-generation upgrades to depth detection and physics it's achieved that promise to make AR experiences seem much more realistic in the future.
The upgrades, part of ArCore's all-new Depth API, will soon allow developers to perform what's known as occlusion, which is when an artificial object can be blocked from view by other real-world objects in a scene. Place a virtual cat in your living room, for instance, and you can see it disappear from view when you angle your camera in a way that places a bed or table or some other object in between.
The result is a more believable scene, because the depth detection going on under the hood means your smartphone better understands every object in a scene and how far apart each object is from one another. Google says it's able to do this through optimizing existing software, so you won't need a phone with a specific sensor or type of processor. It's also all happening on the device itself, and not relying on any help from the cloud. So long as you have a phone that supports ARCore, which is pretty much every new Android phone released in the last few years, you'll be able to access these new features.
We've seen occlusion on mobile phones before. Pokémon Go creator Niantic showed off a video of an occlusion demo featuring a tiny virtual pikachu darting around an urban plaza, dashing in between objects and blending seamlessly with the environment. That was in July 2018. But it was just a video, and not a demo running on a device members of the