This is something I have been personally pushing the Google AR team on for at least a year and well before ARKit came out. I'm glad to see that ARKit made them actually move on this.
Google had been dead set on pushing Tango hardware to OEMs in the hopes that they would be able to lower BOM on the hardware. Everyone in who has been in AR long enough knew that wasn't going to happen and that monocular SLAM in software was the way forward on mobile.
The key thing now for AR devs is that they will have fairly comparable monoSLAM capabilities available on both Android and iOS for their apps.
HOWEVER that just means that the tracking portion of the equation is solved for developers. A few years ago it was possible to make a cross platform monoSLAM app if you used a handful of tools like Kudan or Metaio. Obviously ARKit and ARCore are going to be more robust with better longevity, however the failure of uptake of AR apps was not because of poor tracking, it was because there is an inherent lack of stickiness with AR use cases on mobile. That is, they are good for short infrequent interactions, but rarely will you need to use the SLAM capabilities of an AR app everyday or even multiple times a week.
This is why I am so invested in WebAR, because you can deploy an AR capability outside of a native app and the infrequent use means it can have longevity and a wider variety of users.
Yes, for those apps that people use all the time it will be very valuable, but if you look at the daily driver apps like FB, IG, Snap etc... they are already building the AR ecosystems into their own SLAM. All this does is lower overhead for them. For the average developer it doesn't solve the biggest problems in AR.
Kudos to Google, but developers need to really understand the AR use cases, implementations and UX if they want to use these to good effect.
Google had been dead set on pushing Tango hardware to OEMs in the hopes that they would be able to lower BOM on the hardware. Everyone in who has been in AR long enough knew that wasn't going to happen and that monocular SLAM in software was the way forward on mobile.
The key thing now for AR devs is that they will have fairly comparable monoSLAM capabilities available on both Android and iOS for their apps.
HOWEVER that just means that the tracking portion of the equation is solved for developers. A few years ago it was possible to make a cross platform monoSLAM app if you used a handful of tools like Kudan or Metaio. Obviously ARKit and ARCore are going to be more robust with better longevity, however the failure of uptake of AR apps was not because of poor tracking, it was because there is an inherent lack of stickiness with AR use cases on mobile. That is, they are good for short infrequent interactions, but rarely will you need to use the SLAM capabilities of an AR app everyday or even multiple times a week.
This is why I am so invested in WebAR, because you can deploy an AR capability outside of a native app and the infrequent use means it can have longevity and a wider variety of users.
Yes, for those apps that people use all the time it will be very valuable, but if you look at the daily driver apps like FB, IG, Snap etc... they are already building the AR ecosystems into their own SLAM. All this does is lower overhead for them. For the average developer it doesn't solve the biggest problems in AR.
Kudos to Google, but developers need to really understand the AR use cases, implementations and UX if they want to use these to good effect.