Blending AR Realities for 3D Interaction

How do you create realistic augmented reality experiences on non specialized devices,  like an advanced smartphone?  Say you wanted to overlay data on top of an operating machine so it appeared as part of a 3D AR experience?  We experimented with something like this using a head-set.  So you could look at a part of a machine and see data, warnings, blue prints, predictions...   But what if you wanted to do the same thing using a modern smart-phone?   And just point the phone at parts of the machine and get a realistically designed 3D data display you could navigate? 

Lots below include video of how the approaches can be used, and technical background.

Blending Realities with the ARCore Depth API     Google Dev
Monday, December 9, 2019
Posted by Shahram Izadi, Google Director of Research and Engineering

ARCore, our developer platform for building augmented reality (AR) experiences, allows your devices to display content immersively in the context of the world around us-- making them instantly accessible and useful.

Earlier this year, we introduced Environmental HDR, which brings real world lighting to AR objects and scenes, enhancing immersion with more realistic reflections, shadows, and lighting. Today, we're opening a call for collaborators to try another tool that helps improve immersion with the new Depth API in ARCore, enabling experiences that are vastly more natural, interactive, and helpful.

The ARCore Depth API allows developers to use our depth-from-motion algorithms to create a depth map using a single RGB camera. The depth map is created by taking multiple images from different angles and comparing them as you move your phone to estimate the distance to every pixel.  ... "

Google Stops Tango

Surprised at this.  Tango had impressed me as a way to really understand spaces, analyze them, and intelligently augment them.  Rather than just paste in an image.   Lets hope some of that shows up in ARCore

Google kills augmented reality project Tango to focus on ARCore    By Mark Jansen in DigitalTrends

" ... Tango was always an ambitious project, with big plans for the medical world or as an interactive tour guide in museums. Recently, HoloLens and Tango were used to create a life-like tank experience for guests of the World of Tanks TankFest 2017 event.

Unfortunately for those few who did adopt Tango, it seems the extreme high-end nature of the platform was its stumbling block. Hopefully Google will look to import much of what made Tango great into ARCore.  .... " 

Augmented Reality Challenge

A look at Hololens vs ARKit

Is Augmented Reality going to be Microsoft’s next smartphone moment?
HoloLens was inspirational, but it’s ARKit and ARCore that are going to win developers.  By Peter Bright in ARsTechnica