Know the famous mobile game Pokemon. But do you know what is Augmented Reality, or AR as commonly being called. In fact Pokemon was the first example of use of AR and now the technology has invaded Google’s Pixel phones.
AR is not something of great hype tech, but just a superimposing feature of a computer generated image on the view of user through smartphone camera of the real world.
Simply arrange the characters on the screen of your Pixel phone and those will interact with each other, and even with the user of the smartphone. Record those with the help of camera app into a video. That’s all.
Google launched AR Stickers app lately on its Pixel phone and it has put Star Wars characters in the camera. It’s a big milestone for the search engine giant as the company has been working on the Augmented Reality project called ARCore for quite a long time. In fact the ARCore is a reworked framework and it does not need any extra hardware like the Tango AR tricks.
The only requirement to use the latest AR Stickers app of Google are either Pixel 1 or Pixel 2 smartphone, Android 8.1 mobile operating system and fresh version of the ARCore framework. You can drop various 3D characters into its camera feed. The ARCore will look for horizontal planes and ground the characters in real life whichever plane is nearby like table or floor. Next, you can move camera around it and start recording video or taking pictures.
Currently the ARCore is on version 0.91 and sometime in winter Google will be launching the version 1.0. Several OEMs has been signed for compatibility and so it is expected 100 million users will have access to it in coming months. The present version is only made available on Pixel phones and hence the number of users is much less.
Well, so far it sounds so good as Pixel phone will download the app automatically and it will eat up about 100MB of your storage to make it function, but what if you don’t like it after using for about ten or twenty minutes. Removing the app is not easy. You need to open the system settings first and thereafter head to Apps & Notifications area. Here you need to dig up Sell All Apps and then tap menu button in the top right area. Hit Show System here and tap on uninstall and disable the system app.
Note, in the Star Wars case it is seen the characters don’t do much, but just cycle through fixed set of idle animations most of the time. However, adding two characters will make the scene interesting. Things are up to you whether you are enjoying or disliking, whether you are able to move the characters perfectly or letting it cycle simply. Whatever, be the case, it is a good innovation from Google’s end and more such feature may be launched in near future.
