11 ms·

ARCore: Augmented reality at Android scale

393 points by transcranial 9y ago

objclxt 9y ago
> ARCore will run on millions of devices, starting today with the Pixel and Samsung’s S8, running 7.0 Nougat and above. We’re targeting 100 million devices at the end of the preview. That's...not great? For comparison, ARKit on iOS is going to support 400 million devices at launch (very rough numbers: ARKit runs on any new iPhone Apple's released over the past two years - iPhone 6S/SE/7 - and they sell over 200 million a year). Hardware fragmentation is a tough problem to solve.
- dep_b 9y ago
  I think it runs on every A9 (iPhone 6S) powered phone and tablet or newer. So more or less every iOS device sold since 2015/2016. Yeah and fragmentation in Android versions is pretty bad. Also the quality of the underlying hardware might be not as consistent as in iOS devices. It relies on a lot of sensors to get it right, not just raw CPU power and a nice camera.
  - EddieRingle 9y ago
    > It relies on a lot of sensors to get it right, not just raw CPU power and a nice camera. The Android CDD maintains requirements for sensor accuracy and performance: https://source.android.com/compatibility/android-cdd#7_3_sensors https://source.android.com/compatibility/android-cdd#7_3_sen...
    - richardwhiuk 9y ago
      It does, yes, but the CDD standards are much worse than a 2015/2016 iPhone, or a recent Google Nexus phone. e.g. lots of Android phones basically can't hit low latency audio targets that iOS has been able to hit essentially since launch.
      - Fej 9y ago
        iOS has had a ton of effort put into its audio stack - it was an iPod replacement as well as a phone. Remember when the app was still called iPod? iPod users wouldn't have taken the iPhone as seriously if Apple hadn't put in the work to make audio a first-class citizen. Android doesn't have that pedigree/baggage so it's never been as important.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  The sad part is that they aren't serious to sort it out. Treble could have been the solution, yet they are still allowing for OEM customizations and the OEM are the ones expected to keep pushing the updates, as discussed on the ADB Podcast. Guess how many OEMs will choose to push Treble updates instead of selling new devices.
  - EddieRingle 9y ago
    As I understand it, the OEM modifications will be relegated to the vendor/odm partitions. They specifically hint at being able to push new system partitions directly in the future.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      1 - One needs to buy a new Android 8 device. 2 - Android 7 has currently about 13% acquisition after one year 3 - There is currently no obligation for OEMs to provide updates 4 - Given the failure of security updates, only being delivered to flagship devices, I believe Google will ship them directly when they actually do it.
      - EddieRingle 9y ago
        1 - Which OEMs will be pushing consumers to buy, according to you. 2 - Right, this is something Treble will attempt to solve. 3 - Which is why Google is making it as easy as possible for them to do so, right down to actually pushing out the updates for them.
        pjmlp 9y ago
        1 - I guess only Google with its rather expensive Pixel device, and probably Samsung and Huawei flagships only, in the same price category. 3 - I would really like to be proven wrong here. Still waiting for my Android 7 update on a newly bought device.
        s73ver_ 9y ago
        None of that actually seems to solve the issue of developing updates and pushing them to users, though.
- JosephLark 9y ago
  The exact same thing stuck out to me as well. Mostly because they had to start the article with this sentence: > With more than two billion active devices, Android is the largest mobile platform in the world. So they'll get it onto 5% of active devices, or one in every twenty. Not great, perhaps not even good. I've not been a fan of android fragmentation for awhile now, and have been surprised that Google hasn't been able to do more to attack the issue. Even when Treble launched, I asked myself... is that all? Rock and hard place I guess. I actively avoid android devices because of the issue. My last android device was a tablet in 2011.
  - EddieRingle 9y ago
    > Even when Treble launched, I asked myself... is that all? Rock and hard place I guess. Curious, what exactly were you expecting? There hasn't even been enough time for Treble to play out to see if it brings results.
  - i_cant_speel 9y ago
    Personally I would prefer them to target the top devices with a great product instead of delivering a mediocre product that all devices can run.
    - vlozko 9y ago
      That doesn't make it very appealing for app developers, though, if the size of their base is dramatically limited to just people with both the latest and the greatest devices.
      - kemitche 9y ago
        I'm not sure what's unappealing about targeting users that can afford to always have the latest and greatest. That's effectively exactly what you're doing if you choose to Target iOS over Android.
        mcintyre1994 9y ago
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  Typical google bs. Why not S7? It runs almost identical CPU/GPU as pixel. And it runs 7.0. DoA.
  - kllrnohj 9y ago
    Could be a camera or sensor quality/feature issue. Or could be they just haven't built a lens map for it yet, so they don't have fov and distortion metrics.
  - designcode 9y ago
    S7 is a bit old by today's standards
    - MBCook 9y ago
      That was last year's phone. Apple is supporting the 6S phones which will have been replaced twice (7, 7S) after iOS 11 ships.
    - dingo_bat 9y ago
      The hardware is identical to pixel.
- izacus 9y ago
  Yeah, I don't think shipping for all Androids would have been realistic. AR requires pretty tight tuning for the available hardware stack and I guess Googlers just tuned it for their own phone and the most popular flagship for start. Apple has significantly easier job here - especially since it doesn't need to get OEM buy-in for these kind of things :/
  - MBCook 9y ago
    Does this mean that the lower end OEMs may not provide this on new devices at all? Or if they do it themselves that it may be a very low-quality calibration so the feature doesn't work well?
- samstave 9y ago
  Question on a diff layer: first, 100MM or even 400MM devices is no fucking joke... but Q is: bandwidth to deliver drivel to the devices... not the apps - but how much bandwidth will ads consume over consumed content. If I were a VC, I would be purchasing every-single-pipe-in-existence for the future. We went from pipes-are-pope to content-is-king -- but the fact is that the control of information is in the plumbing ( at the high level ) -- not the holders of attention... they are just firewalls. Facebook is a firewall. Google is a firewall. Reddit is a honeypot. etc... you get the analogy. so... Who owns the pipe. ISPs were vilified... FFs the NSA sent the head of Qwest to prison for not spying... the scientologists refuted the NSA on carnivore (because they were already monitoring the networks for clams) -- the .gov went after the guy who detailed all fibers.. -- how many more examples would you like...
  - igravious 9y ago
    > ISPs were vilified... FFs the NSA sent the head of Qwest to prison for not spying... the scientologists refuted the NSA on carnivore (because they were already monitoring the networks for clams) -- the .gov went after the guy who detailed all fibers.. -- how many more examples would you like... Can you explain your last paragraph a bit? It's a bit telegraphese and I'd like to know to what individual things you are referring. Thanks!
    - samstave 9y ago
      Sorry for the delay, been a long day... --- NSA had been trying to install network monitoring boxes in all the places. this was discovered, after a whistleblower from AT&T mentioned this happening in the MUX/IX in the infamous room 641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A --- There is way too much to educate ppl in one post on the evolution to the above, but I can go back decades if I have time - and ppl have interest... Anyway - the NSA was running all over and installing spying boxes... they got caught. The CEO of Qwest was convicted on "tax fraud" or some such after he had the balls to stand up to the NSA and not install their shit. Aside: Qwest communications was founded as a splinter from a railroad company who realized they had right-of-way easments along ALL their rail lines -- which was easy to lay fiber alongside, and then build a comms co on that backbone. Earthlink, which was funded early by key hollywood scientologists, refused to install the boxes as well -- but because they were already spying on all their user traffic to hunt for "clam" people (clam people are those that made fun of scientology due to scientology's belief that humans are evolved from clams - among a great many other weird beliefs... anyway they werent prosecuted, presumably due to holywood big-shot money... etc...) --- There was a student who was able to look up all the public-works filings for all municipal and federal digging plans/permits/etc and wrote some detailed report on the critical network infra of the US, thus revealing its weaknesses -- the report was nabbed as "national security" as "terrorists" might attack it.. (though they didnt really report on the fiber cuts which caused major upheaval and outages in silicon valley) -- but they shut that kids thesis (i think it was a thesis) down... The revolving door with the NSA and silicon valley is wide open, obvious and pretty big... if you want more info. email me... revealing too much on HN is stupid.
- gordon_freeman 9y ago
  So how come these devices account to "millions of devices" or "targeting 100 million devices"? AFAIK, Pixel devices and S8s combined would be much fewer than 100 million devices. Is this even the correct number?
- matthew349hall 9y ago
  Is it only Tango?
  - vernie 9y ago
    It's not Tango at all.
- retox 9y ago
  Only on HN would targeting 100 million devices for a preview be seen as small fry.
- billius 9y ago
  So what's the alternative? not allow your operating system to run on low spec phones? Stop selling low spec phones? of course it isn't gonna run in a supported configuration on some dumb phone from 5 years ago. those people can't afford or don't care about VR.
- real-hacker 9y ago
  Is there a third-party AR library that can be bundled in an android app, using existing cameras/sensors? I wonder.
forkLding 9y ago
Is there a difference in the core technology underneath ARCore and ARKit? Just generally curious.
- moron4hire 9y ago
  I haven't looked closely into either, but in generaly, they're both going to be doing some form of SLAM (Simultaneous Location And Mapping), but the particulars of the algorithms will be proprietary to each vendor. That said, that should largely be an implementation detail. The positioning data provided through their respective APIs will likely be nearly identical.
- bangonkeyboard 9y ago
  ARCore is based on Tango which was derived from Flyby which was acquired by Apple and turned into ARKit.
  - bhouston 9y ago
    I thought ARKit was derived from metaio's technology? https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/apple-metaio/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/apple-metaio/
    - bangonkeyboard 9y ago
      Informed conjecture from https://medium.com/super-ventures-blog/why-is-arkit-better-than-the-alternatives-af8871889d6a https://medium.com/super-ventures-blog/why-is-arkit-better-t...: Ogmento was founded by my Super Ventures partner Ori Inbar. Ogmento became FlyBy and the team there successfully built a VIO system on IOS leveraging an add-on fish eye camera. This code-base was licenced to Google which became the VIO system for Tango. Apple later bought FlyBy and the same codebase is the core of ARKit VIO. ... I don’t have any hard insider confirmation on this, but I think the Metaio codebase would have helped with the plane detection and probably helped with the mapping/relocalization pieces of the visual tracker. FlyBy had by far the best Inertial tracker on the market, and it’s this piece that makes ARKit magic (instant stereo convergence & metric scale in particular).
dep_b 9y ago
Very interesting. Just paging through the docs the library doesn't seem like a very hard to use at all. The devil might be in the details and it's hard to say how rushed it was after ARKit but they had the parts and bits required for it already done in some form or another.
appimonster 9y ago
Google's ARKit
aylmao 9y ago
Now, someone just needs to build an AR library that abstracts the functionality of these two through a common API.
- moron4hire 9y ago
  I would be very surprised if Unity didn't have it up and running in one or two months. They already support ARKit, Windows Holographic, and Vuforia more or less natively. Also, given the ground-level work they've done to enable support for VR without directly dealing with vendor-specific plugins, adding just one more is probably not that big of a deal.
  - EddieRingle 9y ago
    This looks to ship with Unity support, as well as Unreal.
    - Ologn 9y ago
      Yes. There is a lot of discussion here about how Apple has a headstart on developer commitment with ARkit. What will actually happen for the majority of games targeting AR is people will write it in Unity (or perhaps Unreal), and then set it to compile for iOS and Android. The S8 was the top selling Android phone this year, so this can be rolled out immediately to phones. I just tested out the sample app on my Pixel. As time goes on, the percentage of Android phones with this capability will increase. ARkit does not work on iPhone 6 or earlier, or the iPad Air 2 or earlier. It can roll out to a greater percentage of Apple devices right now, but Android has a larger overall market share any how. Two years from now, I expect AR on iOS and Android to be fairly on par (of course we have to see how the two stacks measure up against one another).
      - thenomad 9y ago
        Where did you find the sample app? I've been looking for it with no luck.
bhouston 9y ago
Sweet! This is amazing and I was hoping this was going to happen sooner rather than later. How long until they update the ChromiumAR project with support for ARCore and when will that preview and then be available? I know that tons of people are waiting on that: https://github.com/googlevr/chromium-webar https://github.com/googlevr/chromium-webar
- kakali 9y ago
  Is this what you're looking for? https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/web/getting-started https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/web/getting-started
  - bhouston 9y ago
    Thank you! I love Google for making the web a top priority on par with Andriod, where as with Apple it is an unloved step-child.
- jsantell 9y ago
  Chromium-WebAR is a similar project, but backed by Tango, and currently exposing a different experimental Web API than WebARonARCore and WebARonARKit. Soon we hope to update Chromium-WebAR (with a rename to WebARonTango) to have API parity with the ARCore/ARKit-backed browsers https://github.com/google-ar/WebARonARCore https://github.com/google-ar/WebARonARCore
abhisuri97 9y ago
If someone can make a react native binding for both ARCore and ARKit, that'd be super amazing and make the bar to entry for AR apps much lower.
- divbit 9y ago
  I will attempt to make a shitty, hacked-together version :)
  - monkmartinez 9y ago
    That's the spirit! hahaha
- sandGorgon 9y ago
  React native is fairly toxic after the Facebook patent grant fiasco. Imagine you building the next big social engine using react native ..And Facebook stealing all your IP.
rsp1984 9y ago
Also it looks like Google is retiring the "Tango" brand [1]. https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/29/google-retires-the-tango-brand-as-its-smartphone-ar-ambitions-move-wider/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/29/google-retires-the-tango-b...
- EddieRingle 9y ago
  The package name of the arcore-preview.apk is 'com.google.tango', so that would seem to be the case.
- bhouston 9y ago
  Tango has technically been a failure in terms of the specific AR hardware. No adoption and no real software support. Apple's purchase of MetaIO and its focus on just SLAM is really the right way to go. Maybe improve it a bit via specialized hardware when available (progressive enhancement in a way), but at least start with SLAM. Google didn't have to be behind on AR at this point in time if they had ditched the focus on Tango hardware and instead focused on SLAM. But that is water under the bridge, Google is now on the right track after being forced to do so by Apple.
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    I think ARKit-style SLAM will turn out to be a fad, they'll be a lot of interesting toy apps, but AR without environmental understanding or persistence I don't think offers much beyond that. The basic ARKit demos we've seen are the same stuff we've been seeing for a while now demoed with third party libraries. Including depth sensing HW was the right solution, but Google doesn't have its own popular smartphone as a forcing function. I predict eventually Apple will include a depth camera, or they'll use dual-cameras to try and synthesize it, and once that happens, then all Android manufacturers will follow suite. If AR is to be useful, it's got to be a lot better at tracking and drift, at making sense of the world, of supporting occlusion and mapping.
    - MBCook 9y ago
      ARKit seems like the near term future. It's useful and no longer requires as much expertise since is available in the OS and is well documented. For a software library it's surprisingly accurate. The Tango model of using extra hardware is probably much better, but seems further ahead. The software model works today on existing devices and lets people see how this is useful. Once you have that convincing people it's with the money to have the hardware added to the phone becomes easier. Given how many Android phones are lower cost than the flagship was Tango ever going to be very popular? Apple could have forced the issue (like Lightning or the headphone jack) but people could always switch Android OEMs to get something cheaper if they don't see the value.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
TeeWEE 9y ago
I ran (the sample app) it on my galaxy s8 and its a bit slow sometimes, but it tracks tables well. Floor not so.. Anybody knows where i can find more apk sample apps to test?
- drcode 9y ago
  Hi, where is this sample app you tried? I don't see it listed in the OP announcement anywhere...
  - tacomonstrous 9y ago
    It can be compiled from the linked GitHub repository.
- drampelt 9y ago
  Looks like they have a few examples here, not all of them have download/source links yet though: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ar https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ar
wyldfire 9y ago
Wow, this Dance Tonite [1] [2] thing looks pretty interesting. [1] https://tonite.dance/ https://tonite.dance/ [2] https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/dance-tonite-ever-changing-vr-collaboration-lcd-soundsystem-and-fans/ https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/dance-tonite-ever...
leoharsha2 9y ago
Even with ARCore and the new ML system in Oreo, Google can’t match iOS, due to the install base of Oreo being nothing now, and won’t be over 20% for another 2 years. Apple's ARkit is going to bring a whole new swath of exclusive apps to iOS. These APIs currently can’t be recreated on android, which means most apps wont be able to be ported with all features, if at all. It’s becoming harder and harder for devs to be cross platform and Google is falling behind Apple.
- cromwellian 9y ago
  I see it as precisely the opposite. It seems like the tendency to engage in platform wars obscures the larger issue that this is all going to settle down and converge over time and nothing Google or Apple is doing right now will be the final form of AR. Remember early 3D in the 90s? We have S3 Virge VX, Voodoo 3dfx, PowerVR, Rendition Verite, Matrox, TNT, etc They had a huge disparity in capabilities, fillrates, APIs, most didn't support OpenGL, even 3dfx -- the card closest to what games settled on as a minimum set of functionality, only supported Carmack's miniGL. Early DirectDraw and Direct3D were horrendous and to get performance, Games had to be ported to each card's proprietary APIs, and effectively, Quake and Unreal became the Unity of their day, offering a higher level abstraction to building cross platform titles until the cards all converged on OpenGL. And converge they did. Eventually most cards offered similar fillrate, multitexturing, and fixed pipeline options, the market settled on a common hardware featureset, and then competed on price and performance. Later, programmable shaders disrupted the market again, and we went though iterations of pixel/vertex shaders from 1.0/1.1/1.2/1.3/1.4 to 2.0 to 3.0 and then GLSL and finally something like CUDA. I think we're going to see the same thing happen in mobile and whatever fanboys propose as some kind of insurmountable advantage will turn out to get commodified if it becomes successful. For example, if AR takes off, or if Apple adds a depth sensor and Tango-like functionality takes off and a huge startup market and VC funding coalesces around it, then roughly 1-2 years later, every Asian OEM will have Android devices with depth cameras and similar functionality. The only reason for the discrepancy today is the hardware fragmentation. But the market follows the money and abhors a vacuum. Hardware convergence in capabilities always follows, and eventually developers end up with middleware to address it. This does lead to "IOS first" for startups, but if you look at the App Store and Play Store today, practically every major game and app you want is available on both platforms. It'll take years for this to shake out, but if AR becomes huge, smartphones in 5 years will all have roughly a similar set of features. P.S. My own opinion is that phone's viewport is too small for a great AR experience. It's a nice initial experience and visually impressive, but will quickly become tiring. The long term form of this has to be some form of glasses, because waving around a phone in all directions and holding it in midair while touching the UI is kind of awkward.
rsp1984 9y ago
I'm a bit skeptical about the performance to be honest: Great tracking for AR requires careful selection and tuning of cameras and IMUs (inertial measurement units -- essentially MEMS gyro + accelerometer). Apple has very tight control over their components so they can do this but managing this across a million OEMs and device models (as it is with the Android ecosystem) is close to impossible. Tango tried to solve the problem by specifying out a software and hardware stack for OEMs to use but now it looks like Google is just too jealous to let have Apple have a good time with ARkit, therefore the "me too".
- cromwellian 9y ago
  Hence why it is available only for Pixel (which Google controls) and the Samsung Galaxy 8 (a large partner) because it can be precisely calibrated. Why is it Google "me too"? Tango was released in 2014.The basic plane detection functionality that's in Tango is derived from the same mechanism that Apple uses. Facebook released an ARKit-like library at their conference before ARKit was even announced. When Apple is late to the party, it seems people say "it doesn't matter if you're first, Apple waits till its 'ready'", but when Apple is perceived to have done something first, suddenly everyone accuses Apple's competitors of being thieves and copying.
  - eridius 9y ago
    > When Apple is late to the party, it seems people say "it doesn't matter if you're first, Apple waits till its 'ready'" Generally people say that in response to everyone accusing Apple of copying.
    - cromwellian 9y ago
      That's mostly in reaction to Apple's history of claiming copying and its litigious look and feel lawsuits. Remember "Redmond Start Your Copiers!" That was an official WWDC banner hung from the rafters by Apple, not some fanboys. Steve Jobs frequently gave interviews accusing rivals of copying, and then copying with the excuse "Good artists copy; great artists steal". All of those years of going on the offensive against everyone, has created a tendency of the other side to look for hypocrisy now. There's something pretentious, and deeply hubristic and lacking in humility in Apple's marketing that I think has fanned the flames of these fanboy wars. In a way, their marketing reminds of the way Trump talks, only with a larger vocabulary. Replace "Great!", "Bigly!", "SAD!", with "Beautiful", "Amazing", "Breakthrough". It's just continuous repetitive of superlatives, even for minor features.
komali2 9y ago
Haha, check out the commits on their github for three.ar.js: https://github.com/google-ar/three.ar.js/commits/master https://github.com/google-ar/three.ar.js/commits/master > Build and increment to 0.1.1 > jsantell committed 26 minutes ago (failed) .... > Fix linting > jsantell committed 24 minutes ago (success) edit: aww come on folks it's all in good fun
- jsantell 9y ago
  release days are fun
  - LeoNatan25 9y ago
    "Nazi" linting rules are not.
pier25 9y ago
Apple and now Google are making it easier to produce AR apps, but the tech has been there for years. I made my first AR demo some 8 years ago for a big event I was working with (on a laptop). IMO AR in smartphones and tablets is a fad that in 2 years nobody will care about. Remember all those gyroscope/accelerometer based games? Yeah me neither. Maybe AR will be awesome when someone (Apple? Microsoft?) releases a pair of lightweight glasses that can produce stereoscopic images superimposed seamlessly over reality, but we are still very, very far away from that.
- joezydeco 9y ago
  But AR glasses/implants will be the evolution of smartphones. There won't be a quantum leap from phone SoC to glasses SoC. Google Glass was an early demonstration of that. So if one needs to evolve AR hardware from phones to glasses, then putting it on the phones is a prudent next step, isn't it?
  - pier25 9y ago
    > So if one needs to evolve AR hardware from phones to glasses, then putting it on the phones is a prudent next step, isn't it? Time will tell, but if we are let's say 10 years away from good AR glasses what difference does it make if smartphones of today can display AR content? Obviously Apple (and now Google) are fighting in the marketing space, not technical one. In truth the problem is really hardware not software.
    - dharma1 9y ago
      I don't think it will take that long to have lightweight additive projection glasses with some sort of camera/depth sensor and eye tracking. The processing power or battery for that form factor will not be there for another 10 years - but offloading processing and power supply to the phone in your pocket via well designed tethering is conceivable. I think we'll have this in a couple of years, and you'll control it via voice recognition and hand gestures.
  - bduerst 9y ago
sidlls 9y ago
Occasionally I'll write an app for my kids or wife. Every time I'm thoroughly impressed by the Apple development ecosystem and thoroughly disgusted by Google's for Android. This is no different. The Android development process is painful (the most verbose, cruft and boilerplate filled Java), cumbersome to organize and build (Gradle is terrible, and buggy) and debug (the integration with Studio is just clunky). About the only thing Google does better is testing releases through the developer console. It's nice to see them finally providing something similar to ARKit. I just wish they'd work on all the other things that make Android development a horrible experience.
- matwood 9y ago
  > I just wish they'd work on all the other things that make Android development a horrible experience. Even worse is you're describing the improved Android development experience.
  - sidlls 9y ago
    I don't even care for Apple in general. If I were ever to develop these for commercial purposes, however, I'd go Apple all the way and consider Android as a secondary market. This reflects the quality of the development environments and the customer base (in terms of revenue). The only reason I write anything for Android is out of necessity (these are the devices we own).
    - izacus 9y ago
      Funny, because then you'd meet the amateur hour that's Xcode automation and continious integration. As soon as you graduate from a toy app to something you need to maintain for awhile, you find out just in what horrible state the Apple development tools are when it comes to UI testing, building in general and constant breakagaes of code when new iOS is released. We literaly spent a month of man-hours every year to fix up constant breaking Xcode CI setup and iOS API breakages while Android team continued development unimpeded. Not to mention constant breaking changes and crashes of Swift language and IDE toolchain. I do agree that for a complete beginner the experience is significantly better in Apple world, but please do not comment on "commercial purposes" development if you haven't done either.
hammerandtongs 9y ago
I'm glad to see this, I'll enjoy experimenting (probably via the aframe ar api) BUT What are the useful applications for AR outside of verticals? I've not seen anything compelling in the phone only incarnation. The headsets have a lot of engineering issues ie many years to overcome. Even with headsets its unclear the value of adding the visual clutter and noise that most ambient/immersive computing demonstrations seem to assume. Whatever value you can add generally requires constant headset wear for it to be ready to hand. This puts even harder engineering problems on the industry as it forces super light and easy headsets (google glass was not AR nor a technical path to it). Not seeing it yet.
- dmitriid 9y ago
  Headsets have nothing (or little) to do with AR. You're probably confusing AR and VR. There are tons of use cases for AR: - https://storify.com/lukew/what-would-augment-reality https://storify.com/lukew/what-would-augment-reality - http://www.madewitharkit.com/ideas http://www.madewitharkit.com/ideas and their twitter https://twitter.com/madewitharkit https://twitter.com/madewitharkit
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Headsets have nothing (or little) to do with AR. Headsets have a lot to do with AR, which is why HoloLens is a headset; headsets let it be handsfree, use the entire circumambient space, and provide an important and intuitive control for the portion of reality the user is interested in having augmented. They also allow for stereoscopic 3d, which is useful, though not always essential, for AR.
  - hammerandtongs 9y ago
    Having seen most of those proposed in one form or another in the past my response is about the same. Can't see any of them being worth putting a headset on. Can't see any of them being worth launching an app on a phone to stare through a camera at. Some of them need some pretty next level ai.
    - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
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iainmerrick 9y ago
It's funny how much marketing speak these big companies feel obliged to cram in. "At Android scale" -> "to catch up with Apple's ARKit" It's actually impressive that Google is able to change direction and and get this software-only AR out the door so quickly to compete with Apple, but they still don't want to admit that's what they're doing.
- cromwellian 9y ago
  Maybe having been developing an advanced AR platform since 2014 has something to do with the speed at which they can carve out and subset a "light" AR experience :)
bozoUser 9y ago
How does this compare to apple`s ARKit?
- MBCook 9y ago
  Hopefully someone will make a good write up. From seeing ARKit examples that people have posted to Twitter the thing that has impressed me the most is the ability of ARKit to track your position even if you turn around and walk around, even all around in the office. I hope Google's version can do that as well because it seems like it would enable some really fun activities.
eco 9y ago
It seems very odd that this comes out and seemingly replaces Tango. Google spent a lot of time going over new stuff with Tango in the latest Google I/O keynote and Google Lens, which was featured quite a bit, seems like it relies on Tango and its depth sensing hardware for their "VPS" stuff. Also, when Clay Bavor was talking about Tango supported devices he remarked that the devices were getting smaller and smaller then implied it was coming to smaller, more traditional devices. I took this to mean they were close to getting the sensors ready for wide deployment but I suppose this could have just meant they were ditching the sensors because they felt the software was good enough. I'm kind of disappointed. I'd hoped that he was saying that Tango sensors would show up on Pixel 2 (which was a long shot, from the leaked photos not really showing the many sensors you see on current Tango devices). Instead we have what feels like a rushed out me-too to match ARKit.
- iainmerrick 9y ago
  An interesting thing about this is that it could actually benefit ARKit by making it less risky. If you develop an ARKit app now, you can be pretty sure you'll be able to port it to Android in a year or two as ARCore rolls out.
  - briandear 9y ago
    Why would it be risky anyway? Are app developers really counting on device parity between iOS and Android? Are developers not going to release something great because there is a potential Android wouldn’t support it? If feels to me that there is more risk in developing to the lowest common denominator — not creating something useful because of the potentrial it won’t work on Android.
    - davidmurdoch 9y ago
      It's risky in that you'd be developing a product that can't be "sold" to both markets. If you have two seemingly viable ideas for an app, and one can reach both platforms, while the other only one, you'll likely choose the former.
    - 9y ago
rubatuga 9y ago
What’s with the majority of the shots being crop shots, or shots that don’t involve the object moving completely in or out of the frame? Seems to me like it’s potentially hiding some visual defects
keredson 9y ago
Also check out: https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/28/8th-wall-raises-2-4-million-for-augmented-reality-tools/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/28/8th-wall-raises-2-4-milli... Supports Unity, and works on both iOS and Android out of the box. (I'm not affiliated, just a supporter.)
- skue 9y ago
  Very curious how they pitched this to investors... “We’re building a platform geared to low end devices that will become obsolete within a couple of years. Invest now, and be part of our team’s amazing journey towards acquihire!”
  - leohart 9y ago
    LOL. My guess would be "All ARKit and ARCore bases are belong to us". 8th Wall XR works on all the ARKit and ARCore devices. Why would you want to create an AR app twice when you can create it once? For free.
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      But why wouldn't I use something proven, like Unreal or Unity in that case?
tuttobene 9y ago
AR is taking off, why haven't we been seeing the explosion of AR glasses? How far off do you think it is until everybody is recording with their glasses and no way of telling so?
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
Looks like a lot of people on this thread think Google's goal is to beat Apple with the features, but in my opinion that's not the case. Google really has nothing to lose by following iOS lead, it's good that they "gave up" on Tango and decided to follow ARKit because that means Google is not trying to beat iOS with Android, but trying to commoditize iOS. You really can't beat Apple at its own game, it's best to let go of that foolish goal and focus on trying to nullify whatever leverage Apple has with their few years lead. Sure ARCore won't be installed on a lot of devices now, but in a couple of years they probably will (This is not the same as the Android ecosystem currently being fragmented because AR provides an entirely new type of UX and will be significant enough for people to get a new phone), and as long as Android gets there Google will have achieved its goal--commoditize AR. In the end, Apple will have made tons of money with their iDevices, Google will NOT have, but they will have gained enough AR user-base that they can use it as their leverage, everybody wins.
nobbis 9y ago
I commented here on Tango 3.5 yrs ago: "remains to be seen if Google can persuade cellphone manufacturers to include 2 special cameras + 2 extra processors in their future devices." Looks like that was the case. It appears the ARCore API is well designed and 1-1 feature equivalent to ARKit, i.e. VIO + plane estimation + ambient light estimation. The API's even share a lot of names, e.g. Anchor, HitTest, PointCloud, LightEstimate. Now that stable positional tracking is an OS-level feature on mobile, whole sets of AR techniques are unlocked. At Abound Labs (http://aboundlabs.com http://aboundlabs.com), we've been solving dense 3D reconstruction. Other open problems that can be tackled now include: large-scale SLAM, collaborative mapping, semantic scene understanding, dynamic reconstruction. With Qualcomm's new active depth sensing module, and Apple's PrimeSense waiting in the wings (7 yrs old, and still the best depth camera), the mobile AR field should become very exciting, very fast.
yohann305 9y ago
Google took the names of the 2 best features of iOS 11 and combined them: ARKit + coreML = ARCore Anyone else here got it?!
0xbear 9y ago
I'd rather they rewrote Camera2 API, which is the most horrible API I've seen in my 20+ years in this profession. It's so bad, one might think it's an elaborate prank, but no, Google does expect you to use it to interact with cameras. That's why all photo apps on Android are so ridiculously bad compared to iOS.
- RivieraKid 9y ago
  Yep, it's horrible. Activity + Fragment API is pretty bad too. And the worst was the first version of in-app billing or GCM (don't remember which one) API. You had to copy hundreds lines of code for a hello world.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
This is something I have been personally pushing the Google AR team on for at least a year and well before ARKit came out. I'm glad to see that ARKit made them actually move on this. Google had been dead set on pushing Tango hardware to OEMs in the hopes that they would be able to lower BOM on the hardware. Everyone in who has been in AR long enough knew that wasn't going to happen and that monocular SLAM in software was the way forward on mobile. The key thing now for AR devs is that they will have fairly comparable monoSLAM capabilities available on both Android and iOS for their apps. HOWEVER that just means that the tracking portion of the equation is solved for developers. A few years ago it was possible to make a cross platform monoSLAM app if you used a handful of tools like Kudan or Metaio. Obviously ARKit and ARCore are going to be more robust with better longevity, however the failure of uptake of AR apps was not because of poor tracking, it was because there is an inherent lack of stickiness with AR use cases on mobile. That is, they are good for short infrequent interactions, but rarely will you need to use the SLAM capabilities of an AR app everyday or even multiple times a week. This is why I am so invested in WebAR, because you can deploy an AR capability outside of a native app and the infrequent use means it can have longevity and a wider variety of users. Yes, for those apps that people use all the time it will be very valuable, but if you look at the daily driver apps like FB, IG, Snap etc... they are already building the AR ecosystems into their own SLAM. All this does is lower overhead for them. For the average developer it doesn't solve the biggest problems in AR. Kudos to Google, but developers need to really understand the AR use cases, implementations and UX if they want to use these to good effect.
mempko 9y ago
My real table is messy enough. Now I can make it messy digitally too!
nkkollaw 9y ago
I don't get if there's app one can download to try this? Doesn't look like it, uh?
- mikeevans 9y ago
  There's a sample you can download and run on compatible hardware: https://github.com/google-ar/arcore-android-sdk/tree/master/samples/java_arcore_hello_ar https://github.com/google-ar/arcore-android-sdk/tree/master/...
  - nkkollaw 9y ago
    Thanks.
designcode 9y ago
Exciting to see competition here
euyyn 9y ago
It can be seen from the video (from the way they avoid it) that the "augmentation" is always superimposed on the "reality". I.e. someone can't walk in front of the virtual objects you put on the table. Is that a limitation of ARKit too? What would it take to make it "real 3D"?
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > It can be seen from the video (from the way they avoid it) that the "augmentation" is always superimposed on the "reality". I think you mean “inferred” rather than “seen”, if it is an assumption based on avoidance, and there are other explanations; while HoloLens is better equipped than phone-holder software AR to avoid this, the one time I did get to use one there were some glitches when the “augmentation” should be obscured y the “reality”. If ARCore handles that, in principle, but is currently annoyingly glitchy in practice on its current preview-quality state, you might reasonably avoid it in demos.
  - euyyn 9y ago
    In live demos yes, but you would totally want to show it in a pre-recorded demo like this one.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      Not if it was glitchy enough that you couldn't reliably get a good take. Either “doesn’t have that feature” or “feature is currently in poor state to demonstrate” are reasons to avoid demoing it.
      - euyyn 9y ago
        You don't need to reliably get a good take to produce a video; you need one good take. If it's bad enough that it won't look right even after taking the best of a large number of attempts, that's as good as the feature not existing for the purpose of my question.
dharma1 9y ago
Will this work on both Qualcomm and Exynos variants of the S8?
hellofunk 9y ago
Do I understand correctly that one big difference between AR on Android vs iOS is that the next iPhone will have advanced 3d sensing abilities that are currently years away on Android phones?
solotronics 9y ago
I can't wait to dance with a hotdog.

393 points by transcranial 9y ago

> ARCore will run on millions of devices, starting today with the Pixel and Samsung’s S8, running 7.0 Nougat and above. We’re targeting 100 million devices at the end of the preview. That's...not great? For comparison, ARKit on iOS is going to support 400 million devices at launch (very rough numbers: ARKit runs on any new iPhone Apple's released over the past two years - iPhone 6S/SE/7 - and they sell over 200 million a year). Hardware fragmentation is a tough problem to solve.

dep_b 9y ago
I think it runs on every A9 (iPhone 6S) powered phone and tablet or newer. So more or less every iOS device sold since 2015/2016. Yeah and fragmentation in Android versions is pretty bad. Also the quality of the underlying hardware might be not as consistent as in iOS devices. It relies on a lot of sensors to get it right, not just raw CPU power and a nice camera.
- EddieRingle 9y ago
  > It relies on a lot of sensors to get it right, not just raw CPU power and a nice camera. The Android CDD maintains requirements for sensor accuracy and performance: https://source.android.com/compatibility/android-cdd#7_3_sensors https://source.android.com/compatibility/android-cdd#7_3_sen...
  - richardwhiuk 9y ago
    It does, yes, but the CDD standards are much worse than a 2015/2016 iPhone, or a recent Google Nexus phone. e.g. lots of Android phones basically can't hit low latency audio targets that iOS has been able to hit essentially since launch.
    - Fej 9y ago
      iOS has had a ton of effort put into its audio stack - it was an iPod replacement as well as a phone. Remember when the app was still called iPod? iPod users wouldn't have taken the iPhone as seriously if Apple hadn't put in the work to make audio a first-class citizen. Android doesn't have that pedigree/baggage so it's never been as important.
pjmlp 9y ago
The sad part is that they aren't serious to sort it out. Treble could have been the solution, yet they are still allowing for OEM customizations and the OEM are the ones expected to keep pushing the updates, as discussed on the ADB Podcast. Guess how many OEMs will choose to push Treble updates instead of selling new devices.
- EddieRingle 9y ago
  As I understand it, the OEM modifications will be relegated to the vendor/odm partitions. They specifically hint at being able to push new system partitions directly in the future.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    1 - One needs to buy a new Android 8 device. 2 - Android 7 has currently about 13% acquisition after one year 3 - There is currently no obligation for OEMs to provide updates 4 - Given the failure of security updates, only being delivered to flagship devices, I believe Google will ship them directly when they actually do it.
    - EddieRingle 9y ago
      1 - Which OEMs will be pushing consumers to buy, according to you. 2 - Right, this is something Treble will attempt to solve. 3 - Which is why Google is making it as easy as possible for them to do so, right down to actually pushing out the updates for them.
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        1 - I guess only Google with its rather expensive Pixel device, and probably Samsung and Huawei flagships only, in the same price category. 3 - I would really like to be proven wrong here. Still waiting for my Android 7 update on a newly bought device.
      - s73ver_ 9y ago
        None of that actually seems to solve the issue of developing updates and pushing them to users, though.
JosephLark 9y ago
The exact same thing stuck out to me as well. Mostly because they had to start the article with this sentence: > With more than two billion active devices, Android is the largest mobile platform in the world. So they'll get it onto 5% of active devices, or one in every twenty. Not great, perhaps not even good. I've not been a fan of android fragmentation for awhile now, and have been surprised that Google hasn't been able to do more to attack the issue. Even when Treble launched, I asked myself... is that all? Rock and hard place I guess. I actively avoid android devices because of the issue. My last android device was a tablet in 2011.
- EddieRingle 9y ago
  > Even when Treble launched, I asked myself... is that all? Rock and hard place I guess. Curious, what exactly were you expecting? There hasn't even been enough time for Treble to play out to see if it brings results.
- i_cant_speel 9y ago
  Personally I would prefer them to target the top devices with a great product instead of delivering a mediocre product that all devices can run.
  - vlozko 9y ago
    That doesn't make it very appealing for app developers, though, if the size of their base is dramatically limited to just people with both the latest and the greatest devices.
    - kemitche 9y ago
      I'm not sure what's unappealing about targeting users that can afford to always have the latest and greatest. That's effectively exactly what you're doing if you choose to Target iOS over Android.
      - mcintyre1994 9y ago
dingo_bat 9y ago
Typical google bs. Why not S7? It runs almost identical CPU/GPU as pixel. And it runs 7.0. DoA.
- kllrnohj 9y ago
  Could be a camera or sensor quality/feature issue. Or could be they just haven't built a lens map for it yet, so they don't have fov and distortion metrics.
- designcode 9y ago
  S7 is a bit old by today's standards
  - MBCook 9y ago
    That was last year's phone. Apple is supporting the 6S phones which will have been replaced twice (7, 7S) after iOS 11 ships.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    The hardware is identical to pixel.
izacus 9y ago
Yeah, I don't think shipping for all Androids would have been realistic. AR requires pretty tight tuning for the available hardware stack and I guess Googlers just tuned it for their own phone and the most popular flagship for start. Apple has significantly easier job here - especially since it doesn't need to get OEM buy-in for these kind of things :/
- MBCook 9y ago
  Does this mean that the lower end OEMs may not provide this on new devices at all? Or if they do it themselves that it may be a very low-quality calibration so the feature doesn't work well?
samstave 9y ago
Question on a diff layer: first, 100MM or even 400MM devices is no fucking joke... but Q is: bandwidth to deliver drivel to the devices... not the apps - but how much bandwidth will ads consume over consumed content. If I were a VC, I would be purchasing every-single-pipe-in-existence for the future. We went from pipes-are-pope to content-is-king -- but the fact is that the control of information is in the plumbing ( at the high level ) -- not the holders of attention... they are just firewalls. Facebook is a firewall. Google is a firewall. Reddit is a honeypot. etc... you get the analogy. so... Who owns the pipe. ISPs were vilified... FFs the NSA sent the head of Qwest to prison for not spying... the scientologists refuted the NSA on carnivore (because they were already monitoring the networks for clams) -- the .gov went after the guy who detailed all fibers.. -- how many more examples would you like...
- igravious 9y ago
  > ISPs were vilified... FFs the NSA sent the head of Qwest to prison for not spying... the scientologists refuted the NSA on carnivore (because they were already monitoring the networks for clams) -- the .gov went after the guy who detailed all fibers.. -- how many more examples would you like... Can you explain your last paragraph a bit? It's a bit telegraphese and I'd like to know to what individual things you are referring. Thanks!
  - samstave 9y ago
    Sorry for the delay, been a long day... --- NSA had been trying to install network monitoring boxes in all the places. this was discovered, after a whistleblower from AT&T mentioned this happening in the MUX/IX in the infamous room 641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A --- There is way too much to educate ppl in one post on the evolution to the above, but I can go back decades if I have time - and ppl have interest... Anyway - the NSA was running all over and installing spying boxes... they got caught. The CEO of Qwest was convicted on "tax fraud" or some such after he had the balls to stand up to the NSA and not install their shit. Aside: Qwest communications was founded as a splinter from a railroad company who realized they had right-of-way easments along ALL their rail lines -- which was easy to lay fiber alongside, and then build a comms co on that backbone. Earthlink, which was funded early by key hollywood scientologists, refused to install the boxes as well -- but because they were already spying on all their user traffic to hunt for "clam" people (clam people are those that made fun of scientology due to scientology's belief that humans are evolved from clams - among a great many other weird beliefs... anyway they werent prosecuted, presumably due to holywood big-shot money... etc...) --- There was a student who was able to look up all the public-works filings for all municipal and federal digging plans/permits/etc and wrote some detailed report on the critical network infra of the US, thus revealing its weaknesses -- the report was nabbed as "national security" as "terrorists" might attack it.. (though they didnt really report on the fiber cuts which caused major upheaval and outages in silicon valley) -- but they shut that kids thesis (i think it was a thesis) down... The revolving door with the NSA and silicon valley is wide open, obvious and pretty big... if you want more info. email me... revealing too much on HN is stupid.
gordon_freeman 9y ago
So how come these devices account to "millions of devices" or "targeting 100 million devices"? AFAIK, Pixel devices and S8s combined would be much fewer than 100 million devices. Is this even the correct number?
matthew349hall 9y ago
Is it only Tango?
- vernie 9y ago
  It's not Tango at all.
retox 9y ago
Only on HN would targeting 100 million devices for a preview be seen as small fry.
billius 9y ago
So what's the alternative? not allow your operating system to run on low spec phones? Stop selling low spec phones? of course it isn't gonna run in a supported configuration on some dumb phone from 5 years ago. those people can't afford or don't care about VR.
real-hacker 9y ago
Is there a third-party AR library that can be bundled in an android app, using existing cameras/sensors? I wonder.

forkLding 9y ago

Is there a difference in the core technology underneath ARCore and ARKit? Just generally curious.

moron4hire 9y ago
I haven't looked closely into either, but in generaly, they're both going to be doing some form of SLAM (Simultaneous Location And Mapping), but the particulars of the algorithms will be proprietary to each vendor. That said, that should largely be an implementation detail. The positioning data provided through their respective APIs will likely be nearly identical.
bangonkeyboard 9y ago
ARCore is based on Tango which was derived from Flyby which was acquired by Apple and turned into ARKit.
- bhouston 9y ago
  I thought ARKit was derived from metaio's technology? https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/apple-metaio/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/apple-metaio/
  - bangonkeyboard 9y ago
    Informed conjecture from https://medium.com/super-ventures-blog/why-is-arkit-better-than-the-alternatives-af8871889d6a https://medium.com/super-ventures-blog/why-is-arkit-better-t...: Ogmento was founded by my Super Ventures partner Ori Inbar. Ogmento became FlyBy and the team there successfully built a VIO system on IOS leveraging an add-on fish eye camera. This code-base was licenced to Google which became the VIO system for Tango. Apple later bought FlyBy and the same codebase is the core of ARKit VIO. ... I don’t have any hard insider confirmation on this, but I think the Metaio codebase would have helped with the plane detection and probably helped with the mapping/relocalization pieces of the visual tracker. FlyBy had by far the best Inertial tracker on the market, and it’s this piece that makes ARKit magic (instant stereo convergence & metric scale in particular).

dep_b 9y ago

Very interesting. Just paging through the docs the library doesn't seem like a very hard to use at all. The devil might be in the details and it's hard to say how rushed it was after ARKit but they had the parts and bits required for it already done in some form or another.

appimonster 9y ago

Google's ARKit

aylmao 9y ago

Now, someone just needs to build an AR library that abstracts the functionality of these two through a common API.

moron4hire 9y ago
I would be very surprised if Unity didn't have it up and running in one or two months. They already support ARKit, Windows Holographic, and Vuforia more or less natively. Also, given the ground-level work they've done to enable support for VR without directly dealing with vendor-specific plugins, adding just one more is probably not that big of a deal.
- EddieRingle 9y ago
  This looks to ship with Unity support, as well as Unreal.
  - Ologn 9y ago
    Yes. There is a lot of discussion here about how Apple has a headstart on developer commitment with ARkit. What will actually happen for the majority of games targeting AR is people will write it in Unity (or perhaps Unreal), and then set it to compile for iOS and Android. The S8 was the top selling Android phone this year, so this can be rolled out immediately to phones. I just tested out the sample app on my Pixel. As time goes on, the percentage of Android phones with this capability will increase. ARkit does not work on iPhone 6 or earlier, or the iPad Air 2 or earlier. It can roll out to a greater percentage of Apple devices right now, but Android has a larger overall market share any how. Two years from now, I expect AR on iOS and Android to be fairly on par (of course we have to see how the two stacks measure up against one another).
    - thenomad 9y ago
      Where did you find the sample app? I've been looking for it with no luck.

bhouston 9y ago

Sweet! This is amazing and I was hoping this was going to happen sooner rather than later. How long until they update the ChromiumAR project with support for ARCore and when will that preview and then be available? I know that tons of people are waiting on that: https://github.com/googlevr/chromium-webar https://github.com/googlevr/chromium-webar

kakali 9y ago
Is this what you're looking for? https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/web/getting-started https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/web/getting-started
- bhouston 9y ago
  Thank you! I love Google for making the web a top priority on par with Andriod, where as with Apple it is an unloved step-child.
jsantell 9y ago
Chromium-WebAR is a similar project, but backed by Tango, and currently exposing a different experimental Web API than WebARonARCore and WebARonARKit. Soon we hope to update Chromium-WebAR (with a rename to WebARonTango) to have API parity with the ARCore/ARKit-backed browsers https://github.com/google-ar/WebARonARCore https://github.com/google-ar/WebARonARCore

abhisuri97 9y ago

If someone can make a react native binding for both ARCore and ARKit, that'd be super amazing and make the bar to entry for AR apps much lower.

divbit 9y ago
I will attempt to make a shitty, hacked-together version :)
- monkmartinez 9y ago
  That's the spirit! hahaha
sandGorgon 9y ago
React native is fairly toxic after the Facebook patent grant fiasco. Imagine you building the next big social engine using react native ..And Facebook stealing all your IP.

rsp1984 9y ago

Also it looks like Google is retiring the "Tango" brand [1]. https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/29/google-retires-the-tango-brand-as-its-smartphone-ar-ambitions-move-wider/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/29/google-retires-the-tango-b...

EddieRingle 9y ago
The package name of the arcore-preview.apk is 'com.google.tango', so that would seem to be the case.
bhouston 9y ago
Tango has technically been a failure in terms of the specific AR hardware. No adoption and no real software support. Apple's purchase of MetaIO and its focus on just SLAM is really the right way to go. Maybe improve it a bit via specialized hardware when available (progressive enhancement in a way), but at least start with SLAM. Google didn't have to be behind on AR at this point in time if they had ditched the focus on Tango hardware and instead focused on SLAM. But that is water under the bridge, Google is now on the right track after being forced to do so by Apple.
- cromwellian 9y ago
  I think ARKit-style SLAM will turn out to be a fad, they'll be a lot of interesting toy apps, but AR without environmental understanding or persistence I don't think offers much beyond that. The basic ARKit demos we've seen are the same stuff we've been seeing for a while now demoed with third party libraries. Including depth sensing HW was the right solution, but Google doesn't have its own popular smartphone as a forcing function. I predict eventually Apple will include a depth camera, or they'll use dual-cameras to try and synthesize it, and once that happens, then all Android manufacturers will follow suite. If AR is to be useful, it's got to be a lot better at tracking and drift, at making sense of the world, of supporting occlusion and mapping.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    ARKit seems like the near term future. It's useful and no longer requires as much expertise since is available in the OS and is well documented. For a software library it's surprisingly accurate. The Tango model of using extra hardware is probably much better, but seems further ahead. The software model works today on existing devices and lets people see how this is useful. Once you have that convincing people it's with the money to have the hardware added to the phone becomes easier. Given how many Android phones are lower cost than the flagship was Tango ever going to be very popular? Apple could have forced the issue (like Lightning or the headphone jack) but people could always switch Android OEMs to get something cheaper if they don't see the value.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

TeeWEE 9y ago

I ran (the sample app) it on my galaxy s8 and its a bit slow sometimes, but it tracks tables well. Floor not so.. Anybody knows where i can find more apk sample apps to test?

drcode 9y ago
Hi, where is this sample app you tried? I don't see it listed in the OP announcement anywhere...
- tacomonstrous 9y ago
  It can be compiled from the linked GitHub repository.
drampelt 9y ago
Looks like they have a few examples here, not all of them have download/source links yet though: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ar https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ar

wyldfire 9y ago

Wow, this Dance Tonite [1] [2] thing looks pretty interesting. [1] https://tonite.dance/ https://tonite.dance/ [2] https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/dance-tonite-ever-changing-vr-collaboration-lcd-soundsystem-and-fans/ https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/dance-tonite-ever...

leoharsha2 9y ago

Even with ARCore and the new ML system in Oreo, Google can’t match iOS, due to the install base of Oreo being nothing now, and won’t be over 20% for another 2 years. Apple's ARkit is going to bring a whole new swath of exclusive apps to iOS. These APIs currently can’t be recreated on android, which means most apps wont be able to be ported with all features, if at all. It’s becoming harder and harder for devs to be cross platform and Google is falling behind Apple.

cromwellian 9y ago
I see it as precisely the opposite. It seems like the tendency to engage in platform wars obscures the larger issue that this is all going to settle down and converge over time and nothing Google or Apple is doing right now will be the final form of AR. Remember early 3D in the 90s? We have S3 Virge VX, Voodoo 3dfx, PowerVR, Rendition Verite, Matrox, TNT, etc They had a huge disparity in capabilities, fillrates, APIs, most didn't support OpenGL, even 3dfx -- the card closest to what games settled on as a minimum set of functionality, only supported Carmack's miniGL. Early DirectDraw and Direct3D were horrendous and to get performance, Games had to be ported to each card's proprietary APIs, and effectively, Quake and Unreal became the Unity of their day, offering a higher level abstraction to building cross platform titles until the cards all converged on OpenGL. And converge they did. Eventually most cards offered similar fillrate, multitexturing, and fixed pipeline options, the market settled on a common hardware featureset, and then competed on price and performance. Later, programmable shaders disrupted the market again, and we went though iterations of pixel/vertex shaders from 1.0/1.1/1.2/1.3/1.4 to 2.0 to 3.0 and then GLSL and finally something like CUDA. I think we're going to see the same thing happen in mobile and whatever fanboys propose as some kind of insurmountable advantage will turn out to get commodified if it becomes successful. For example, if AR takes off, or if Apple adds a depth sensor and Tango-like functionality takes off and a huge startup market and VC funding coalesces around it, then roughly 1-2 years later, every Asian OEM will have Android devices with depth cameras and similar functionality. The only reason for the discrepancy today is the hardware fragmentation. But the market follows the money and abhors a vacuum. Hardware convergence in capabilities always follows, and eventually developers end up with middleware to address it. This does lead to "IOS first" for startups, but if you look at the App Store and Play Store today, practically every major game and app you want is available on both platforms. It'll take years for this to shake out, but if AR becomes huge, smartphones in 5 years will all have roughly a similar set of features. P.S. My own opinion is that phone's viewport is too small for a great AR experience. It's a nice initial experience and visually impressive, but will quickly become tiring. The long term form of this has to be some form of glasses, because waving around a phone in all directions and holding it in midair while touching the UI is kind of awkward.

rsp1984 9y ago

I'm a bit skeptical about the performance to be honest: Great tracking for AR requires careful selection and tuning of cameras and IMUs (inertial measurement units -- essentially MEMS gyro + accelerometer). Apple has very tight control over their components so they can do this but managing this across a million OEMs and device models (as it is with the Android ecosystem) is close to impossible. Tango tried to solve the problem by specifying out a software and hardware stack for OEMs to use but now it looks like Google is just too jealous to let have Apple have a good time with ARkit, therefore the "me too".

cromwellian 9y ago
Hence why it is available only for Pixel (which Google controls) and the Samsung Galaxy 8 (a large partner) because it can be precisely calibrated. Why is it Google "me too"? Tango was released in 2014.The basic plane detection functionality that's in Tango is derived from the same mechanism that Apple uses. Facebook released an ARKit-like library at their conference before ARKit was even announced. When Apple is late to the party, it seems people say "it doesn't matter if you're first, Apple waits till its 'ready'", but when Apple is perceived to have done something first, suddenly everyone accuses Apple's competitors of being thieves and copying.
- eridius 9y ago
  > When Apple is late to the party, it seems people say "it doesn't matter if you're first, Apple waits till its 'ready'" Generally people say that in response to everyone accusing Apple of copying.
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    That's mostly in reaction to Apple's history of claiming copying and its litigious look and feel lawsuits. Remember "Redmond Start Your Copiers!" That was an official WWDC banner hung from the rafters by Apple, not some fanboys. Steve Jobs frequently gave interviews accusing rivals of copying, and then copying with the excuse "Good artists copy; great artists steal". All of those years of going on the offensive against everyone, has created a tendency of the other side to look for hypocrisy now. There's something pretentious, and deeply hubristic and lacking in humility in Apple's marketing that I think has fanned the flames of these fanboy wars. In a way, their marketing reminds of the way Trump talks, only with a larger vocabulary. Replace "Great!", "Bigly!", "SAD!", with "Beautiful", "Amazing", "Breakthrough". It's just continuous repetitive of superlatives, even for minor features.

komali2 9y ago

Haha, check out the commits on their github for three.ar.js: https://github.com/google-ar/three.ar.js/commits/master https://github.com/google-ar/three.ar.js/commits/master > Build and increment to 0.1.1 > jsantell committed 26 minutes ago (failed) .... > Fix linting > jsantell committed 24 minutes ago (success) edit: aww come on folks it's all in good fun

jsantell 9y ago
release days are fun
- LeoNatan25 9y ago
  "Nazi" linting rules are not.

pier25 9y ago

Apple and now Google are making it easier to produce AR apps, but the tech has been there for years. I made my first AR demo some 8 years ago for a big event I was working with (on a laptop). IMO AR in smartphones and tablets is a fad that in 2 years nobody will care about. Remember all those gyroscope/accelerometer based games? Yeah me neither. Maybe AR will be awesome when someone (Apple? Microsoft?) releases a pair of lightweight glasses that can produce stereoscopic images superimposed seamlessly over reality, but we are still very, very far away from that.

joezydeco 9y ago
But AR glasses/implants will be the evolution of smartphones. There won't be a quantum leap from phone SoC to glasses SoC. Google Glass was an early demonstration of that. So if one needs to evolve AR hardware from phones to glasses, then putting it on the phones is a prudent next step, isn't it?
- pier25 9y ago
  > So if one needs to evolve AR hardware from phones to glasses, then putting it on the phones is a prudent next step, isn't it? Time will tell, but if we are let's say 10 years away from good AR glasses what difference does it make if smartphones of today can display AR content? Obviously Apple (and now Google) are fighting in the marketing space, not technical one. In truth the problem is really hardware not software.
  - dharma1 9y ago
    I don't think it will take that long to have lightweight additive projection glasses with some sort of camera/depth sensor and eye tracking. The processing power or battery for that form factor will not be there for another 10 years - but offloading processing and power supply to the phone in your pocket via well designed tethering is conceivable. I think we'll have this in a couple of years, and you'll control it via voice recognition and hand gestures.
- bduerst 9y ago

sidlls 9y ago

Occasionally I'll write an app for my kids or wife. Every time I'm thoroughly impressed by the Apple development ecosystem and thoroughly disgusted by Google's for Android. This is no different. The Android development process is painful (the most verbose, cruft and boilerplate filled Java), cumbersome to organize and build (Gradle is terrible, and buggy) and debug (the integration with Studio is just clunky). About the only thing Google does better is testing releases through the developer console. It's nice to see them finally providing something similar to ARKit. I just wish they'd work on all the other things that make Android development a horrible experience.

matwood 9y ago
> I just wish they'd work on all the other things that make Android development a horrible experience. Even worse is you're describing the improved Android development experience.
- sidlls 9y ago
  I don't even care for Apple in general. If I were ever to develop these for commercial purposes, however, I'd go Apple all the way and consider Android as a secondary market. This reflects the quality of the development environments and the customer base (in terms of revenue). The only reason I write anything for Android is out of necessity (these are the devices we own).
  - izacus 9y ago
    Funny, because then you'd meet the amateur hour that's Xcode automation and continious integration. As soon as you graduate from a toy app to something you need to maintain for awhile, you find out just in what horrible state the Apple development tools are when it comes to UI testing, building in general and constant breakagaes of code when new iOS is released. We literaly spent a month of man-hours every year to fix up constant breaking Xcode CI setup and iOS API breakages while Android team continued development unimpeded. Not to mention constant breaking changes and crashes of Swift language and IDE toolchain. I do agree that for a complete beginner the experience is significantly better in Apple world, but please do not comment on "commercial purposes" development if you haven't done either.

hammerandtongs 9y ago

I'm glad to see this, I'll enjoy experimenting (probably via the aframe ar api) BUT What are the useful applications for AR outside of verticals? I've not seen anything compelling in the phone only incarnation. The headsets have a lot of engineering issues ie many years to overcome. Even with headsets its unclear the value of adding the visual clutter and noise that most ambient/immersive computing demonstrations seem to assume. Whatever value you can add generally requires constant headset wear for it to be ready to hand. This puts even harder engineering problems on the industry as it forces super light and easy headsets (google glass was not AR nor a technical path to it). Not seeing it yet.

dmitriid 9y ago
Headsets have nothing (or little) to do with AR. You're probably confusing AR and VR. There are tons of use cases for AR: - https://storify.com/lukew/what-would-augment-reality https://storify.com/lukew/what-would-augment-reality - http://www.madewitharkit.com/ideas http://www.madewitharkit.com/ideas and their twitter https://twitter.com/madewitharkit https://twitter.com/madewitharkit
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Headsets have nothing (or little) to do with AR. Headsets have a lot to do with AR, which is why HoloLens is a headset; headsets let it be handsfree, use the entire circumambient space, and provide an important and intuitive control for the portion of reality the user is interested in having augmented. They also allow for stereoscopic 3d, which is useful, though not always essential, for AR.
- hammerandtongs 9y ago
  Having seen most of those proposed in one form or another in the past my response is about the same. Can't see any of them being worth putting a headset on. Can't see any of them being worth launching an app on a phone to stare through a camera at. Some of them need some pretty next level ai.
  - 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

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iainmerrick 9y ago

It's funny how much marketing speak these big companies feel obliged to cram in. "At Android scale" -> "to catch up with Apple's ARKit" It's actually impressive that Google is able to change direction and and get this software-only AR out the door so quickly to compete with Apple, but they still don't want to admit that's what they're doing.

cromwellian 9y ago
Maybe having been developing an advanced AR platform since 2014 has something to do with the speed at which they can carve out and subset a "light" AR experience :)

bozoUser 9y ago

How does this compare to apple`s ARKit?

MBCook 9y ago
Hopefully someone will make a good write up. From seeing ARKit examples that people have posted to Twitter the thing that has impressed me the most is the ability of ARKit to track your position even if you turn around and walk around, even all around in the office. I hope Google's version can do that as well because it seems like it would enable some really fun activities.

eco 9y ago

It seems very odd that this comes out and seemingly replaces Tango. Google spent a lot of time going over new stuff with Tango in the latest Google I/O keynote and Google Lens, which was featured quite a bit, seems like it relies on Tango and its depth sensing hardware for their "VPS" stuff. Also, when Clay Bavor was talking about Tango supported devices he remarked that the devices were getting smaller and smaller then implied it was coming to smaller, more traditional devices. I took this to mean they were close to getting the sensors ready for wide deployment but I suppose this could have just meant they were ditching the sensors because they felt the software was good enough. I'm kind of disappointed. I'd hoped that he was saying that Tango sensors would show up on Pixel 2 (which was a long shot, from the leaked photos not really showing the many sensors you see on current Tango devices). Instead we have what feels like a rushed out me-too to match ARKit.

iainmerrick 9y ago
An interesting thing about this is that it could actually benefit ARKit by making it less risky. If you develop an ARKit app now, you can be pretty sure you'll be able to port it to Android in a year or two as ARCore rolls out.
- briandear 9y ago
  Why would it be risky anyway? Are app developers really counting on device parity between iOS and Android? Are developers not going to release something great because there is a potential Android wouldn’t support it? If feels to me that there is more risk in developing to the lowest common denominator — not creating something useful because of the potentrial it won’t work on Android.
  - davidmurdoch 9y ago
    It's risky in that you'd be developing a product that can't be "sold" to both markets. If you have two seemingly viable ideas for an app, and one can reach both platforms, while the other only one, you'll likely choose the former.
  - 9y ago

rubatuga 9y ago

What’s with the majority of the shots being crop shots, or shots that don’t involve the object moving completely in or out of the frame? Seems to me like it’s potentially hiding some visual defects

keredson 9y ago

Also check out: https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/28/8th-wall-raises-2-4-million-for-augmented-reality-tools/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/28/8th-wall-raises-2-4-milli... Supports Unity, and works on both iOS and Android out of the box. (I'm not affiliated, just a supporter.)

skue 9y ago
Very curious how they pitched this to investors... “We’re building a platform geared to low end devices that will become obsolete within a couple of years. Invest now, and be part of our team’s amazing journey towards acquihire!”
- leohart 9y ago
  LOL. My guess would be "All ARKit and ARCore bases are belong to us". 8th Wall XR works on all the ARKit and ARCore devices. Why would you want to create an AR app twice when you can create it once? For free.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    But why wouldn't I use something proven, like Unreal or Unity in that case?

tuttobene 9y ago

AR is taking off, why haven't we been seeing the explosion of AR glasses? How far off do you think it is until everybody is recording with their glasses and no way of telling so?

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

Looks like a lot of people on this thread think Google's goal is to beat Apple with the features, but in my opinion that's not the case. Google really has nothing to lose by following iOS lead, it's good that they "gave up" on Tango and decided to follow ARKit because that means Google is not trying to beat iOS with Android, but trying to commoditize iOS. You really can't beat Apple at its own game, it's best to let go of that foolish goal and focus on trying to nullify whatever leverage Apple has with their few years lead. Sure ARCore won't be installed on a lot of devices now, but in a couple of years they probably will (This is not the same as the Android ecosystem currently being fragmented because AR provides an entirely new type of UX and will be significant enough for people to get a new phone), and as long as Android gets there Google will have achieved its goal--commoditize AR. In the end, Apple will have made tons of money with their iDevices, Google will NOT have, but they will have gained enough AR user-base that they can use it as their leverage, everybody wins.

nobbis 9y ago

I commented here on Tango 3.5 yrs ago: "remains to be seen if Google can persuade cellphone manufacturers to include 2 special cameras + 2 extra processors in their future devices." Looks like that was the case. It appears the ARCore API is well designed and 1-1 feature equivalent to ARKit, i.e. VIO + plane estimation + ambient light estimation. The API's even share a lot of names, e.g. Anchor, HitTest, PointCloud, LightEstimate. Now that stable positional tracking is an OS-level feature on mobile, whole sets of AR techniques are unlocked. At Abound Labs (http://aboundlabs.com http://aboundlabs.com), we've been solving dense 3D reconstruction. Other open problems that can be tackled now include: large-scale SLAM, collaborative mapping, semantic scene understanding, dynamic reconstruction. With Qualcomm's new active depth sensing module, and Apple's PrimeSense waiting in the wings (7 yrs old, and still the best depth camera), the mobile AR field should become very exciting, very fast.

yohann305 9y ago

Google took the names of the 2 best features of iOS 11 and combined them: ARKit + coreML = ARCore Anyone else here got it?!

0xbear 9y ago

I'd rather they rewrote Camera2 API, which is the most horrible API I've seen in my 20+ years in this profession. It's so bad, one might think it's an elaborate prank, but no, Google does expect you to use it to interact with cameras. That's why all photo apps on Android are so ridiculously bad compared to iOS.

RivieraKid 9y ago
Yep, it's horrible. Activity + Fragment API is pretty bad too. And the worst was the first version of in-app billing or GCM (don't remember which one) API. You had to copy hundreds lines of code for a hello world.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

This is something I have been personally pushing the Google AR team on for at least a year and well before ARKit came out. I'm glad to see that ARKit made them actually move on this. Google had been dead set on pushing Tango hardware to OEMs in the hopes that they would be able to lower BOM on the hardware. Everyone in who has been in AR long enough knew that wasn't going to happen and that monocular SLAM in software was the way forward on mobile. The key thing now for AR devs is that they will have fairly comparable monoSLAM capabilities available on both Android and iOS for their apps. HOWEVER that just means that the tracking portion of the equation is solved for developers. A few years ago it was possible to make a cross platform monoSLAM app if you used a handful of tools like Kudan or Metaio. Obviously ARKit and ARCore are going to be more robust with better longevity, however the failure of uptake of AR apps was not because of poor tracking, it was because there is an inherent lack of stickiness with AR use cases on mobile. That is, they are good for short infrequent interactions, but rarely will you need to use the SLAM capabilities of an AR app everyday or even multiple times a week. This is why I am so invested in WebAR, because you can deploy an AR capability outside of a native app and the infrequent use means it can have longevity and a wider variety of users. Yes, for those apps that people use all the time it will be very valuable, but if you look at the daily driver apps like FB, IG, Snap etc... they are already building the AR ecosystems into their own SLAM. All this does is lower overhead for them. For the average developer it doesn't solve the biggest problems in AR. Kudos to Google, but developers need to really understand the AR use cases, implementations and UX if they want to use these to good effect.

mempko 9y ago

My real table is messy enough. Now I can make it messy digitally too!

nkkollaw 9y ago

I don't get if there's app one can download to try this? Doesn't look like it, uh?

mikeevans 9y ago
There's a sample you can download and run on compatible hardware: https://github.com/google-ar/arcore-android-sdk/tree/master/samples/java_arcore_hello_ar https://github.com/google-ar/arcore-android-sdk/tree/master/...
- nkkollaw 9y ago
  Thanks.

designcode 9y ago

Exciting to see competition here

euyyn 9y ago

It can be seen from the video (from the way they avoid it) that the "augmentation" is always superimposed on the "reality". I.e. someone can't walk in front of the virtual objects you put on the table. Is that a limitation of ARKit too? What would it take to make it "real 3D"?

dragonwriter 9y ago
> It can be seen from the video (from the way they avoid it) that the "augmentation" is always superimposed on the "reality". I think you mean “inferred” rather than “seen”, if it is an assumption based on avoidance, and there are other explanations; while HoloLens is better equipped than phone-holder software AR to avoid this, the one time I did get to use one there were some glitches when the “augmentation” should be obscured y the “reality”. If ARCore handles that, in principle, but is currently annoyingly glitchy in practice on its current preview-quality state, you might reasonably avoid it in demos.
- euyyn 9y ago
  In live demos yes, but you would totally want to show it in a pre-recorded demo like this one.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    Not if it was glitchy enough that you couldn't reliably get a good take. Either “doesn’t have that feature” or “feature is currently in poor state to demonstrate” are reasons to avoid demoing it.
    - euyyn 9y ago
      You don't need to reliably get a good take to produce a video; you need one good take. If it's bad enough that it won't look right even after taking the best of a large number of attempts, that's as good as the feature not existing for the purpose of my question.

dharma1 9y ago

Will this work on both Qualcomm and Exynos variants of the S8?

hellofunk 9y ago

Do I understand correctly that one big difference between AR on Android vs iOS is that the next iPhone will have advanced 3d sensing abilities that are currently years away on Android phones?

solotronics 9y ago

I can't wait to dance with a hotdog.