While our phones have certainly gotten more immersive with time, with bigger and better screens they are still devices that require us to divert our attention from reality. We have to make a conscious decision to break away from our reality every time we look at our phones. So, there is certainly a room for improvement in this interaction; some way for us to access the information we need without exiting our reality. And that is what AR tends to accomplish. It wants to merge the physical and the digital world; by superimposing digital elements onto the physical world. Those Snapchat filters you love are a fairly good example.
But while we might be a long way off form super slick AR glasses being ubiquitous, our phones have become a great platform for us to explore this emerging technology with the development of Apple’s ARkit and Google’s ARCore. This has allowed developers to create their own unique experiences using these technologies. That wonderful thing about ARCore is that unlike its predecessor Tango, it doesn’t require any special hardware. It can run on an Android device running Nougat or higher. This means that hundreds of millions of Android smartphones have this ability. Still, if you are interested in trying AR and buying a new phone you should make sure your phone supports ARCore.
This is the same doubt a prospective buyer of the Asus Zenfone 7 Pro had, wondering if the smartphone would be receiving support for Google’s depth API. A mod on the Asus forums replied that Zenfone 7 Pro will definitely be receiving support for ARCore in its next OTA update. So, if this something that you were waiting for or something that you did not even know about, you can now give some AR apps a spin on your new Zenfone 7 Pro.
