Our New Reality, Augmented
Just over a week ago Google released Android 8.1, still slowly rolling out to the Google Pixel line. Now normally, 0.1 upgrades don't really do much, but this one is a little different. It contained the necessary framework for what it called ARCore -- Augmented Reality.
Right now there's two big types of "Reality" we see these days, one is Virtual Reality (VR) and the other is Augmented Reality (AR). The biggest difference and the easiest way to think of it is that VR is creating a whole new world around you, putting you in a completely different place, while AR works with what you're seeing right now, the world you're in, and adding elements to it. Most famously Pokemon Go came out last summer and had an "AR mode" that added basically added a Pokemon on top of whatever your camera was looking at. Now that implementation was okay, but not great. So why is what Google has done such a big deal?
Although Google started working on AR, starting with a platform called Tango in 2014 (now discontinued), they weren't the first, and won't be the last, but it's a big push in the mobile space now, given that both Android and iOS have an AR platform, with ARCore and ARKit respectively.So let's take a look at what Google has done with Tango/ARCore and why it's worth talking about.
Now what you're seeing above is a photo of ARCore in action. As part of their release, the team at Google teamed up with Lucasfilms to release Star Wars Stickers in the intial AR release. Now at first glance, there doesn't really seem to be anything special about the photo above, but that's a bit of the beauty of it. Part of the focus is having these stickers able to understand the area, not physically, but from a lighting perspective. You look a little closely and you can see that the stickers are matching their colors and shading to however the room looks.
Take a look at the video below, and you'll see something even more amazing about what Google's ARCore is capable of.
The biggest part to notice is what happens as I move around towards the characters. The system does something called tracking. Tracking, basically, is the phone/camera being able to understand where the floor is, and keep the characters in one spot as I move. You'll see that the stickers stay in position and I can physically move close to them and even around them.
I think right now, in it's current form sure, it's a fun little party trick, but imagine a world where you can pull out your camera and look at a restaurant, and on the screen you get information about how its rating, how long it's open, what's suggested. Now wouldn't that make life easier when you're trying to decide whether or not to eat at a particular restaurant? Believe it or not, that future isn't too far away with Google Lens.
See you in the next one :) thanks for reading!
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