ARCore Developer Preview 2
Augmented reality is a powerful way to bring the physical and digital worlds together. AR places digital objects and useful information into the real world around us, which creates a huge opportunity to make our phones more intuitive, more helpful and a whole lot more fun.
We’ve been working on augmented reality since 2014, with our earliest investments in Project Tango. We’ve taken everything we learned from that to build ARCore, which launched in preview earlier this year. Whereas Tango required special hardware, ARCore is a fast, performant, Android-scale SDK that enables high-quality augmented reality across millions of qualified mobile devices.
Developers can experiment with ARCore now, and we’ve seen some amazing creations from the community. ARCore also powers AR Stickers on the Pixel camera, which launched earlier this week and lets you add interactive AR characters and playful emojis directly into photos and videos to bring your favorite stories to life.
Today, we’re releasing an update to our ARCore Developer Preview with several technical improvements to the SDK, including:
A new C API for use with the Android NDK that complements our existing Java, Unity, and Unreal SDKs;
Functionality that lets AR apps pause and resume AR sessions, for example to let a user return to an AR app after taking a phone call;
Improved accuracy and runtime efficiency across our anchor, plane finding, and point cloud APIs.
To learn more about the SDK updates, check out the Android, Unity, and Unreal Github pages.
As we focus on bringing augmented reality to the entire Android ecosystem with ARCore, we’re turning down support of Tango. Thank you to our incredible community of developers who made such progress with Tango over the last three years. We look forward to continuing the journey with you on ARCore.
If you’re a developer interested in AR, now's the time to start experimenting. In the coming months, we’ll launch ARCore v1.0, with support for over 100 million devices. And soon, many augmented reality experiences will be available in the Play Store. We can’t wait to see what you create.
