Today Google announced the availability of the ARCore Software Development Kit (SDK) preview, enabling a native android  implementation of augmented reality contents .

(excerpt from the google vr website)

With more than two billion active devices, Android is the largest mobile platform in the world. And for the past nine years, we’ve worked to create a rich set of tools, frameworks and APIs that deliver developers’ creations to people everywhere. Today, we’re releasing a preview of a new software development kit (SDK) called ARCore. It brings augmented reality capabilities to existing and future Android phones. Developers can start experimenting with it right now.

Some of the key features include:

  • Motion tracking: Using the phone’s camera to observe feature points in the room and IMU sensor data, ARCore determines both the position and orientation (pose) of the phone as it moves. Virtual objects remain accurately placed.
  • Environmental understanding: It’s common for AR objects to be placed on a floor or a table. ARCore can detect horizontal surfaces using the same feature points it uses for motion tracking.
  • Light estimation: ARCore observes the ambient light in the environment and makes it possible for developers to light virtual objects in ways that match their surroundings, making their appearance even more realistic.

Full Text: https://www.blog.google/products/google-vr/arcore-augmented-reality-android-scale/

The new SDK can be downloaded and tested at: https://developers.google.com/ar/

Further AR Examples and Experiments in the field of Google AR/VR can be viewed under: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ar