At their developer conference in San Francisco, Samsung has today announced they will be adopting Google’s recently announced Augmented Reality platform, ARCore, into their Galaxy range of devices
It’s a big announcement for Google who, though they have the most popular mobile operating system in the world, has yet to really sell their phones in volume. Samsung on the other hand very much has the market in terms of phone sales in the Android world.
Samsung was the initial partner with Google for the launch of the ARCore platform, though only the S8 was supported in the SDK – this announcement will see that expand to current (S8+ & Note 8) and future Galaxy Devices.
The announcement has been lauded by head of Google’s Virtual Reality team who tweeted:
Excited to be working with Samsung to bring ARCore to even more Galaxy devices. S8+ and Note8 coming soon. Future phones will support, too. pic.twitter.com/dqVkvFWYfg
— Clay Bavor (@claybavor) October 18, 2017
Samsung recently switched on Daydream VR support for the S8/S8+ and now Note 8 which has increased the install base of users manyfold. With Samsung’s adoption of ARCore for Augmented Reality on their Galaxy devices, this should enable Google’s AR tech to reach many more people and push adoption – possibly even rivaling Apple’s ARKit Augmented Reality platform.
ARCore is quite interesting and even in its initial stages has great promise. Developers were quick to begin releasing apps for the platform, but with a much larger user base of Galaxy users there will be a much larger incentive for developers to release more.
If you’re the owner, or future owner of a Samsung Galaxy device you should be able to try out ARCore very soon.
