Even with ARCore and the new ML system in Oreo, Google can’t match iOS, due to the install base of Oreo being nothing now, and won’t be over 20% for another 2 years.
Apple's ARkit is going to bring a whole new swath of exclusive apps to iOS. These APIs currently can’t be recreated on android, which means most apps wont be able to be ported with all features, if at all.
It’s becoming harder and harder for devs to be cross platform and Google is falling behind Apple.
I see it as precisely the opposite. It seems like the tendency to engage in platform wars obscures the larger issue that this is all going to settle down and converge over time and nothing Google or Apple is doing right now will be the final form of AR.
Remember early 3D in the 90s? We have S3 Virge VX, Voodoo 3dfx, PowerVR, Rendition Verite, Matrox, TNT, etc They had a huge disparity in capabilities, fillrates, APIs, most didn't support OpenGL, even 3dfx -- the card closest to what games settled on as a minimum set of functionality, only supported Carmack's miniGL. Early DirectDraw and Direct3D were horrendous and to get performance, Games had to be ported to each card's proprietary APIs, and effectively, Quake and Unreal became the Unity of their day, offering a higher level abstraction to building cross platform titles until the cards all converged on OpenGL.
And converge they did. Eventually most cards offered similar fillrate, multitexturing, and fixed pipeline options, the market settled on a common hardware featureset, and then competed on price and performance.
Later, programmable shaders disrupted the market again, and we went though iterations of pixel/vertex shaders from 1.0/1.1/1.2/1.3/1.4 to 2.0 to 3.0 and then GLSL and finally something like CUDA.
I think we're going to see the same thing happen in mobile and whatever fanboys propose as some kind of insurmountable advantage will turn out to get commodified if it becomes successful. For example, if AR takes off, or if Apple adds a depth sensor and Tango-like functionality takes off and a huge startup market and VC funding coalesces around it, then roughly 1-2 years later, every Asian OEM will have Android devices with depth cameras and similar functionality.
The only reason for the discrepancy today is the hardware fragmentation. But the market follows the money and abhors a vacuum. Hardware convergence in capabilities always follows, and eventually developers end up with middleware to address it.
This does lead to "IOS first" for startups, but if you look at the App Store and Play Store today, practically every major game and app you want is available on both platforms. It'll take years for this to shake out, but if AR becomes huge, smartphones in 5 years will all have roughly a similar set of features.
P.S. My own opinion is that phone's viewport is too small for a great AR experience. It's a nice initial experience and visually impressive, but will quickly become tiring. The long term form of this has to be some form of glasses, because waving around a phone in all directions and holding it in midair while touching the UI is kind of awkward.
> My own opinion is that phone's viewport is too small for a great AR experience. It's a nice initial experience and visually impressive, but will quickly become tiring. The long term form of this has to be some form of glasses, because waving around a phone in all directions and holding it in midair while touching the UI is kind of awkward.
I'm 100% certain that's what Apple is preparing for.
AR in a phone is a neat toy, a gimmick. The most perfect AR toolkit ever made still won't change the fact that you're holding a phone in your hand, interacting with it through a screen, etc.
A number of people have speculated that this is an attempt to get some real world trial and have apps that are already ready so if they announce some sort of HoloLens thing in the future the software/devs are already 80% there.
I don't know about the game market in detail, but when I see people indie mobile games 80% of the time they're building for iOS, and saying they'll look at an Android port if the game does well.
Obviously if they built using Unity it should be a simpler port, but clearly not all of them do.
There's plenty of cross platform tools for games now. If you build with Unity or Unreal, you hit multiple platforms at once, including Steam and consoles.
If you're doing a 2D game, theres lots of middleware options as well. Yes, people build for iOS first because you only have to test for a few devices -- its like developing for fixed console HW -- and because iOS users tend to spend more. But most indie games that make money eventually quickly saturate on each platform, and so devs go multiplatform relatively quickly when they make out revenue on a given platform.
The games business is pretty tough if you're not a triple-A breakout hit.
I guess it depends on if you care about early adoption or not or what country you're in. Most of the indie games are available on Android. And if you happen to be in Asia, much of the indie games target Android first.
I just don't think most people care about these issues, both platforms have a huge software library, and both have a huge number of users. I'm kind of tired of people turning technical threads into platform war discussions.
If you're a loyal iOS developer or user, why do you care about what Android does? This announcement is only positive. For Android users, it signals platform level AR support. And for AR fans, it signifies a growing convergence on a low hanging fruit "AR-lite" that will be available to both platforms.
It would be like if only one platform had a Web browser and suddenly the other platform got a browser, and people we're all angry like "Well, platform #1 had a browser first! And it has more websites that optimize for it!"
The real story is "hey, now there are two web browsers, and the web will be larger"
The endgame is AR-lite now has two platforms competing. That's good for users, and good for developers, despite an intermediate period of chaos and fragmentation as things evolve.
You didn't read what I wrote, I'm talking about the natural progression as to how HW and SW platforms evolve. I use 3D accelerator hardware as an example of initial fragment and divergence followed by convergence.
Where did I write that there's no legitimate use cases for AR? I find games the LEAST PLAUSIBLE use case because holding your phone and moving around a virtual plane is a nice demo, but sucks for extended game sessions.
Indoor navigation and stuff like Google Lens is the most plausible use. And many of the examples you show in your ideas link like showing seat positions, aren't possible in ARKit because it doesn't have persistence.
A lot of the examples in the ideas thread require area understanding like Google's Visual Positioning System, or Tango. If you want a consumer to be able to pop open the camera and instantly have it tell him where his seat is on an airplane, you will have needed to already have stored persistent features of the interior of the plane. (e.g. Tango ADF https://developers.google.com/tango/overview/area-learning)
Look at the Tango app in Lowes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAQ0y19uEYo) This is the kind of AR that is useful to the majority of people, it's the kind of AR that is a killer app, and it's the kind of AR that won't be available without area understanding capable HW deployed for creating these maps so they can be consumed by cheaper SW-only AR stacks.
> Where did I write that there's no legitimate use cases for AR? I find games the LEAST PLAUSIBLE use case because holding your phone and moving around a virtual plane is a nice demo, sucks for extended game sessions.
AR with an HMD (like HoloLens) changes that a bit. I don't see technically why phone based AR couldn't use something similar to current phone-holder VR HMDs, though a camera accessory with a more optimal position for AR use than a phone camera in a horizontal holder would have might be useful to that.
