Get ready for a (virtual) veritable tidal wave of augmented reality (AR) apps coming to your Android phone.
Google announced during GDC 2018 that 60-plus ARCore apps are landing on the Google Play Store today, boosting the lineup of already available Android AR apps and games.
As a refresh, ARCore is the Google platform that lets developers create augmented reality experiences for Android phones. Using a phone’s camera, the app tracks your position in real-time and places digitally rendered objects onto the real world, making for even more immersive experiences.
Today’s news comes a few weeks after Google launched the ARCore 1.0 SDK to developers, which simultaneously brought ARCore to over 100 million Android devices. With the SDK, developers can now publish AR-enabled apps to the Google Play Store.
So, what can you play?
ARCore 1.0 may have just released into the wild, but Google says developers are already creating inciting AR experiences. The company highlighted a few of the newest additions in a release.
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My Tamagotchi Forever
Bandai Namco has created a game called My Tamagotchi Forever, letting users raise the Tamagotchi from their childhood in an AR town they can place in the real world. My Tamagotchi Forever is available today in the Play Store.
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TendAR
AR Emoji may be all the rage with the Galaxy S9, but what about virtual fish that eat people’s emotions? Yeah, bet you hadn’t thought of that.
TendAR is a game that has a virtual fish named Guppy respond to your expressions and stay alive by ‘eating’ the emotions of other people. Google says the game taps the Google Cloud API for its computer vision and object recognition needs while also relying on ARCore. TendAR will be available in July.
Coming in Q2 2018 is The Walking Dead: Our World. As you might expect, this location-based AR game is all about fending off zombies.
In addition to ARCore, The Walking Dead AR game utilizes the Google Maps API, which Google opened up to game developers last week. Similar to mega mobile hit Pokemon Go, The Walking Dead: Our World will base gameplay action on your real-life surroundings.
Two other ARCore apps we have word on are Remote AR, an enterprise collaboration app available today, and ARCat, which allows users to raise a virtual cat using their smartphone and is also out now.
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Pottery Barn 360 Room View
Not part of GDC but tied to the influx of Google AR apps are several new ARCore retail apps, such as Pottery Barn 360 Room View.
As you might expect, the app lets you place digital furniture in a room to see how it looks and change fabric colors.
There’s also a feature in the eBay app called ‘Which Box’ that lets users figure out which size box they’ll need to ship a product. Not exactly fun, but certainly practical.
Ikea Place, which lets you put virtual furniture around a room (but unfortunately not build it in real-life for you) as well as tell which of the furnishings you already own are like Ikea products, is also now available in the Google Play Store.
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Source: Techradar.