After several months of rumors, Google decided to launch it to the market. Arcorea development platform that promised to drastically improve the user experience augmented reality on compatible devicesOver time, this technology has become established as Google's standard for mobile AR, and today there are a large number of games and applications that benefit from it on Android (and even some experiences on iOS thanks to their shared APIs).
What is ARCore and how does it work?
Arcore It is a platform designed by Google that benefits from several APIs responsible for enabling your device recognize, analyze and interact with the environment that it sees through the camera. But not only that: it's also a tool designed for developers to work with augmented reality on smartphones in a much simpler way, without needing to create the entire machine vision and tracking system from scratch.
Google defines ARCore as its platform for creating AR experiencesUsing different APIs, it allows the phone Detect your surroundings, understand the physical world around you, and integrate digital information about it. Some of these APIs are available on both Android and iOS, which makes it easier AR experiences shared among users from different platforms.
In essence, ARCore performs two fundamental tasks: on the one hand, It tracks the device's position and orientation. as it moves; on the other hand, builds its own understanding of real space by identifying surfaces, points of interest, and lighting conditions. Based on this understanding, it is able to place virtual objects that appear to be part of the real scene.
ARCore improves four key aspects of augmented reality, which are the following:
- Motion Tracking: ARCore is able to recognize the position of a person or object through the environment thanks to a technology known as inertial visual odometrywhich combines the camera's image with the phone's inertial sensors. In this way it can to capture movement in an environment and update the device's virtual position in real time.
- Understanding light and shadows: supported by several engines of light estimateARCore can recognize the amount and type of visible light and how it interacts with objects and the environment. This allows projected 3D models to have lighting and shadows in accordance with the real world, which makes the result much more realistic.
- Understanding of the environment: The platform detects the size and location of horizontal, vertical, and angled surfaces (floors, tables, walls, furniture, etc.), and creates a digital "map" of the environmentThanks to this environmental understanding, it becomes easier to anchor virtual objects stably onto those surfaces.
- User Integration: Unlike the most basic conventional AR, the option presented by Google allows the user interact with and control augmented reality elementsYou can move, rotate, scale objects, write annotations on the physical space, or even play with characters that respond to your movements.
The last point, in particular, is essential for the advancement of this type of technology. If we consider that the user can interact with objects projected in augmented realityEverything changes. The games of VR AR and can do without many physical controls: the device itself is capable of interpreting gesture, position, and movement, creating immersive experiences without additional accessories.
Furthermore, ARCore isn't limited to games. It's the foundation of utilities such as... 3D animals from the Google search engineEducational applications that place anatomical or planetary models in the classroom, trading tools that display furniture and decorations to scale in your living room, or professional construction solutions that overlap plans and technical notes on the physical work.
Compatible devices
Furthermore, ARCore initially worked with only a few devices besides the Google Pixel, but now a large number of smartphones can take advantage of this tool. These include most of the devices in Google's product portfolio. OnePlus, Huawei, Samsung and obviously all pixel and some NexusIf you want to see the full list of compatible mobile devices, you can do so at developers.google.com/ar/discover/supported-devices.
Google designed ARCore to work on a wide variety of certified Android phones, generally with relatively recent versions of Android and with minimal requirements for camera, sensors, and graphics power. Furthermore, the component «Google Play services for AR"It is installed and updated from Google Play, providing the necessary AR engine for the applications to work without the user having to worry about technical details.
To use AR with ARCore, in practice you need: a compatible Android devicethat the AR service is enabled (managed from the system settings), sufficient storage space, and at least one AR application installedIn many cases, when you open an ARCore-based app for the first time, the system itself will ask you to download or update these services.
The true "game changer"
Augmented reality was very well received by the public from the start, being a technology with great reception in games and demonstrationsHowever, it remained stagnant for a while until it arrived Google Arcore, who was a true "game changer", a term used when something arrives and improves upon the previous version so much that it causes a paradigm shift.
In this case, the jump relates to the fact that the user can interact precisely and naturally with AR elementsand with developers having a unified Android SDK that doesn't depend on specific hardware. This opens up a new door of possibilities: from educational apps in which interactive 3D models are placed in the classroom, up to online shops that allow you to view products at real size at home before buying them, including tools for design, architecture, industrial maintenance, or medicine.
An example that practically everyone knows is Pokémon GOwhich used augmented reality to display virtual creatures integrated into the real world. Although the game uses its own techniques and has been adapting to Google's APIs, the idea that makes it so appealing is similar to the one driving ARCore: combine the physical space you see through the camera with interactive information generated by software.
Another well-known case is IKEA PlaceThe app lets you see how products from their catalog would look in your home using your phone's camera. Thanks to its ability to understand the environment, ARCore can detect the ground and other planes and place life-size furniture on them, with a coherent perspective as you move around the room.
But although at the moment the augmented reality It's not something extremely present in all aspects of daily life, but applications are already being seen in education, commerce, tourism, industry, construction and healthcare which can greatly help in the near future to improve processes, training and access to information.
ARCore for developers and associated libraries
From a developer's point of view, ARCore is distributed as a SDK with native APIs for essential AR functions: motion tracking, environment understanding, light estimation, and virtual content anchoring. Google offers SDKs for Native Android, Unity, Unreal and other platformsso that experiences can be created from scratch or existing apps can be improved by adding AR features.
In the Android ecosystem, complementary libraries have also emerged such as Sceneformdesigned to facilitate Importing and rendering 3D models without needing to master OpenGL. Sceneform acted as middleware between ARCore and the graphics engine, managing model loading, scene creation, user interaction, and the integration of formats such as glTF or binary files .glbwhich are especially lightweight and quick to charge.
Although Google shelved the official development of Sceneform, a developer community The project has continued with versions maintained on GitHub, demonstrating the interest in further simplifying working with ARCore. In parallel, there are alternatives to this platform such as ARKit on iOS o vophoriawhich also allow the creation of AR experiences but with different approaches and, in some cases, paid licensing models.
Regardless of the library chosen, the common pattern is the same: ARCore takes care of read the environment, create the virtual map and manage the anchors, while other software layers supply the 3D models, animations, and interaction logic that the user will see about their surroundings.
This combination of ARCore's power, Android's maturity, and third-party tools is allowing AR to move from a curiosity to becoming a reality. a cross-cutting technical resource which applies to leisure, education, commerce, advertising or scientific research, among many other areas.
Everything suggests that, as the power of devices increases and the quality of cameras and sensors improves, ARCore experiences will become increasingly realistic, seamless, and everyday., integrating almost invisibly into the apps we use daily.