World-building engines Unreal and Unity are both on board with support of Google’s new ARCore augmented reality toolkit.
For those unfamiliar, ARCore is the evolution of Google’s Tango platform that runs first on Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S8 with Android 7.0 or better running on it. It’s an answer to Apple’s ARKit, but available on fewer phones initially. We’ve had months of interesting projects rolling out on the Internet showing the capabilities of ARKit, but with Unity and Unreal support now in place for Google’s ARCore we’re likely to start seeing an increase in cool Android-based AR examples.
If you want to get started with Unity you need Unity version 2017.2 beta 9 or later and Android API SDK v.24 or later. Then download and import the ARCore SDK for Unity. the configure Unity “following the steps in the Unity Forum.”
If you want to get started with Unreal, check out the ARCore developer preview and the early access version available on GitHub. The software is planned for a larger roll-out with version 4.18 of the engine arriving in mid-October.
