Technological watch is a big part of our job lately. Most importantly since we are more and more designing new services (For our AVENUE H2020 project for example). 

At the Google IO18, they announced the ARCore ARKit lib. What better occasion to test it than our Creative Fridays...

Augmented reality is becoming more and more a everyday tool. We decided to spend the day testing the new Google library ARCore.

Jérôme came up with this great idea of increasing our knowledge on AR today! 

After spending an hour gathering more information of what's feasible and what's not we started listing which of our projects could benefit of AR.

The goal here was to imagine, withing our potential projects, what AR features could improve user experience.

From that, we extracted 5 main topics:

- Gaming - DEA* (Treasure hunt or AR escape room ? We're sure you'd love to try that! )
- Static Map - AVENUE H2020 (we prefer to keep the description of that to ourselves for now :) )
- Tutorials - AVENUE H2020 (to display in AR any tutorials on physical objects/buildings)
- AR Controller - DEA* (to Virtually control a Physical object)
- Contextual Popups - Traverse (for cultural, navigation, advertising pusposes and much more)

In order to be sure that it is commercially viable, we divided the test in 3 teams. An iOS team and an Android team.

The goal is to detect our MobileThinking logo and automatically display a 3D object! GO!

The Android team is making good and fast progress. 

Documentation isn't exactly the strong suite of ARCore, but the library is pretty well done with plenty of example which makes it Ok to handle. Let's see how it's like when we start to implement more complicated features.

1. AR is becoming really really easy to use
2. ARCore and ARKit is full of cool helpers and examples
3. There is not much community around ARCore yet
4. ARCore is requires a lot of computing power... Phones are warm, batteries are low... Some phones/tablets are simply not compatible
5. IT'S A LOT OF FUN!
6. We will have to refresh our Math lessons

Please keep in mind we had only an afternoon. The exercise was part of the team building Creative Friday.