New AR content for Google Maps, ARCore & Geospatial Creator get updates
Google Maps will soon show new AR experiences at interesting locations. Updates for Geospatial Creator and ARCore are also coming.
At I/O 2024, Google announced a pilot program to showcase AR content from select partners on Google Maps. The platform will display the geospatial AR content in Street View and via Google Lens on smartphones.
To access the AR experiences, users simply need to look up a location in Google Maps. If AR content is available for the selected point of interest, and you are in the area, tap the image labeled "AR Experience" and point your smartphone as you would with Google Lens.
If you are exploring a location from a distance, the same AR experience can be displayed in Street View. Experiences can also be shared and amplified on social media via a deep link or QR code.
The early access program will launch later this year as a six-month pilot in Singapore and Paris. Google is working with the Singapore Tourism Board and Google Arts & Culture, among others, to develop use cases that demonstrate how partners can reach the broadest and most relevant audiences.
Updates for ARCore and Geospatial Creator
Google also announced that Geospatial Creator in Adobe Aero is now available to all developers worldwide, with improved localization speed and anchor accuracy.
Since the beginning of the year, developers have been able to use Geospatial Creator in Unity to create and customize anchors at scale using C#. The Places API from the Google Maps Platform now makes it possible to create content once and anchor it to any location. Finally, the ARCore Geospatial API is now available in India.
Google focuses heavily on AR and AI at I/O 2024
At Google I/O 2024, the company also showed a prototype of data glasses with a built-in AI assistant called Project Astra. This multimodal assistant can continuously register everything it sees and hears and react to it in a context-sensitive manner. However, it is unclear how serious Google is about data glasses.
Compared to previous years, VR plays a minimal role at I/O 2024. In 2019, the topic was almost completely absent from the program. Instead, Google is focusing entirely on artificial intelligence as the company's core technology.
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