Google’s ARCore for Android is getting a long-requested feature: shared experiences.
ARCore 1.2, announced at I/O today, will add a new feature called Cloud Anchors. As Clay Bavor, VP of AR and VR at the company explained to UploadVR, this allows multiple smartphone users to view the same AR content anchored to the same physical space. You could project a chess board onto a table and sit either side for a realistic match, for example, or view virtual screens from different angles.
Crucially, Cloud Anchors are cross-compatible with iOS. As an example of what’s possible with the platform, Google is launching a new app called Just A Line, which Bavor described as a “simplified Tilt Brush” in which multiple users can paint in the same space.
That’s not all that’s new in ARCore 1.2, though. Google is also introducing Sceneform, which allows Android java developers to add AR experiences to their app with just a few lines of code. There’s also updates to scene understanding, including ‘vertical point detection’, which identifies textures, walls and other features as targets to improve stability.
Finally, there’s augmented images, which allows developers to upload up to 1,000 images that can be recognized by your phone and trigger AR experiences. “You can do things like hold a phone up to a toybox and actually see inside the toybox,” Bavor explained.
ARCore 1.2 is rolling out today.
