These New AR Features Of Google Will Make It To Apps And Software Soon

Last year, Google unveiled ARCore, the company’s augmented reality platform, and it has been working in silence to improve it. During that time, Google has achieved some important milestones in physics and the detection of depth, both of which promise a more realistic feel to AR.

These upgrades, which will soon enable developers to have access to occlusion, which means the augmented objects will appear to be blocked from view by the ones in the real world. For example, if you place an artificial chair in the living room and then change the angle of the camera so that there is something that actually exists in the room locates in between, the chair will look like it is blocked.

This is enabled by depth detection, which allows the smartphones to have a better idea of how far each object in a scene is to each other. According to Google, the technology is achieved by optimizing the current software, so there is no need to purchase extra sensors or other accessories. The tech will not need the help of the cloud either as everything will happen locally on your device. The only requirement is that your phone needs to support ARCore, which means most smartphones released in the last few years will have access to these upgrades.

Occlusion demonstration is nothing strange. Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go made use of this technology to show a tiny Pikachu dashing around in a plaza all while avoiding the real objects. However, the video was posted last year and it did not come with software or something like that allowing users to try themselves.

Those who have early access to the technology said that while they had to test the upgrades in a controlled environment created by Google, the technology worked exactly as the company said it would do.

The features are already available for Houzz, an app for home design and the Search feature of Google itself.

In Houzz, the upgrades can be found in “View in My Room 3D.” The search giant also said that over 200 million Android handheld devices can experience occlusion for anything with AR models in Search.

Google has other updates for ARCore that it has not yet released. The company said that it would work closely with developers and some other collaborators to fine-tune these features first.

These unreleased upgrades have advanced deeper into the realm of 3D mapping and promise more realistic physics. Generally, what these upgrades can do is to enable AR subjects to move around just like they would if they were real in the physical world. For example, in the photos below, the colorful cubes were created out of nothing that can bounce off anything.

The company has also made some sorts of mini-games to show what these upgrades can do. In these games, AR subjects can avoid other objects existing in the real world by going over or around them. One of them features a virtual robot in a food fight. The software takes the walls and the furniture inside the room into consideration and can even leave splatters and stains on the walls.

Unfortunately, these games or demos are not available to the public but Google said that it hoped developers would work on something similar when the upgrades become widely available to them.

The company has not released a fixed timeline for the release of these tools yet but we know for sure that we may expect to see them in real life next year.