With ARCore and Google Lens, we're working to make smartphone cameras smarter. ARCore enables developers to build apps that can understand your environment and place objects and information in it. Google Lens uses your camera to help make sense of what you see, whether that's automatically creating contact information from a business card before you lose it, or soon being able to identify the breed of a cute dog you saw in the park. At Mobile World Congress, we're launching ARCore 1.0 along with new support for developers, and we're releasing updates for Lens and rolling it out to more people.
ARCore, Google's augmented reality SDK for Android, is out of preview and launching as version 1.0. Developers can now publish AR apps to the Play Store, and it's a great time to start building. ARCore works on 100 million Android smartphones, and advanced AR capabilities are available on all of these devices. It works on 13 different models right now (Google's Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL; Samsung's Galaxy S8, S8+, Note8, S7 and S7 edge; LGE's V30 and V30+ (Android O only); ASUS's Zenfone AR; and OnePlus's OnePlus 5). And beyond those available today, we're partnering with many manufacturers to enable their upcoming devices this year, including Samsung, Huawei, LGE, Motorola, ASUS, Xiaomi, HMD/Nokia, ZTE, Sony Mobile, and Vivo.
Making ARCore work on more devices is only part of the equation. We're bringing developers additional improvements and support to make their AR development process faster and easier. ARCore 1.0 features improved environmental understanding that enables users to place virtual assets on textured surfaces like posters, furniture, toy boxes, books, cans and more. Android Studio Beta now supports ARCore in the Emulator, so you can quickly test your app in a virtual environment right from your desktop.
Everyone should get to experience augmented reality, so we're working to bring it to people everywhere, including China. We'll be supporting ARCore in China on partner devices sold there— starting with Huawei, Xiaomi and Samsung—to enable them to distribute AR apps through their app stores.
We've partnered with a few great developers to showcase how they're planning to use AR in their apps. Snapchat has created an immersive experience that invites you into a "portal"—in this case, FC Barcelona's legendary Camp Nou stadium. Visualize different room interiors inside your home with Sotheby's International Realty. See Porsche's Mission E Concept vehicle right in your driveway, and explore how it works. With OTTO AR, choose pieces from an exclusive set of furniture and place them, true to scale, in a room. Ghostbusters World, based on the film franchise, is coming soon. In China, place furniture and over 100,000 other pieces with Easyhome Homestyler, see items and place them in your home when you shop on JD.com, or play games from NetEase, Wargaming and Game Insight.
With Google Lens, your phone's camera can help you understand the world around you, and, we're expanding availability of the Google Lens preview. With Lens in Google Photos, when you take a picture, you can get more information about what's in your photo. In the coming weeks, Lens will be available to all Google Photos English-language users who have the latest version of the app on Android and iOS. Also over the coming weeks, English-language users on compatible flagship devices will get the camera-based Lens experience within the Google Assistant. We'll add support for more devices over time.
And while it's still a preview, we've continued to make improvements to Google Lens. Since launch, we've added text selection features, the ability to create contacts and events from a photo in one tap, and—in the coming weeks—improved support for recognizing common animals and plants, like different dog breeds and flowers.
Smarter cameras will enable our smartphones to do more. With ARCore 1.0, developers can start building delightful and helpful AR experiences for them right now. And Lens, powered by AI and computer vision, makes it easier to search and take action on what you see. As these technologies continue to grow, we'll see more ways that they can help people have fun and get more done on their phones.
As humans, we rely on sound to guide us through our environment, help us communicate with others and connect us with what's happening around us. Whether walking along a busy city street or attending a packed music concert, we're able to hear hundreds of sounds coming from different directions. So when it comes to AR, VR, games and even 360 video, you need rich sound to create an engaging immersive experience that makes you feel like you're really there. Today, we're releasing a new spatial audio software development kit (SDK) called Resonance Audio. It's based on technology from Google's VR Audio SDK, and it works at scale across mobile and desktop platforms.
Bringing rich, dynamic audio environments into your VR, AR, gaming, or video experiences without affecting performance can be challenging. There are often few CPU resources allocated for audio, especially on mobile, which can limit the number of simultaneous high-fidelity 3D sound sources for complex environments. The SDK uses highly optimized digital signal processing algorithms based on higher order Ambisonics to spatialize hundreds of simultaneous 3D sound sources, without compromising audio quality, even on mobile. We're also introducing a new feature in Unity for precomputing highly realistic reverb effects that accurately match the acoustic properties of the environment, reducing CPU usage significantly during playback.
We know how important it is that audio solutions integrate seamlessly with your preferred audio middleware and sound design tools. With Resonance Audio, we've released cross-platform SDKs for the most popular game engines, audio engines, and digital audio workstations (DAW) to streamline workflows, so you can focus on creating more immersive audio. The SDKs run on Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS and Linux platforms and provide integrations for Unity, Unreal Engine, FMOD, Wwise and DAWs. We also provide native APIs for C/C++, Java, Objective-C and the web. This multi-platform support enables developers to implement sound designs once, and easily deploy their project with consistent sounding results across the top mobile and desktop platforms. Sound designers can save time by using our new DAW plugin for accurately monitoring spatial audio that's destined for YouTube videos or apps developed with Resonance Audio SDKs. Web developers get the open source Resonance Audio Web SDK that works in the top web browsers by using the Web Audio API.
DAW plugin for sound designers to monitor audio destined for YouTube 360 videos or apps developed with the SDK
By providing powerful tools for accurately modeling complex sound environments, Resonance Audio goes beyond basic 3D spatialization. The SDK enables developers to control the direction acoustic waves propagate from sound sources. For example, when standing behind a guitar player, it can sound quieter than when standing in front. And when facing the direction of the guitar, it can sound louder than when your back is turned.
Another SDK feature is automatically rendering near-field effects when sound sources get close to a listener's head, providing an accurate perception of distance, even when sources are close to the ear. The SDK also enables sound source spread, by specifying the width of the source, allowing sound to be simulated from a tiny point in space up to a wall of sound. We've also released an Ambisonic recording tool to spatially capture your sound design directly within Unity, save it to a file, and use it anywhere Ambisonic soundfield playback is supported, from game engines to YouTube videos.
If you're interested in creating rich, immersive soundscapes using cutting-edge spatial audio technology, check out the Resonance Audio documentation on our developer site, let us know what you think through GitHub, and show us what you build with #ResonanceAudio on social media; we'll be resharing our favorites.
Posted by Nathan Martz, Product Manager, Google VR
At Google I/O, we announced Daydream—Google's platform for high quality, mobile virtual reality—and released early developer resources to get the community started with building for Daydream. Since then, the team has been hard at work, listening to feedback and evolving these resources into a suite of powerful developer tools.
Today, we are proud to announce that the Google VR SDK 1.0 with support for Daydream has graduated out of beta, and is now available on the Daydream developer site. Our updated SDK simplifies common VR development tasks so you can focus on building immersive, interactive mobile VR applications for Daydream-ready phones and headsets, and supports integrated asynchronous reprojection, high fidelity spatialized audio, and interactions using the Daydream controller.
To make it even easier to start developing with the Google VR SDK 1.0, we’ve partnered with Unity and Unreal so you can use the game engines and tools you’re already familiar with. We’ve also updated the site with full documentation, reference sample apps, and tutorials.
Native Unity integration
This release marks the debut of native Daydream integration in Unity, which enables Daydream developers to take full advantage of all of Unity’s optimizations in VR rendering. It also adds support for features like head tracking, deep linking, and easy Android manifest configuration. Many Daydream launch apps are already working with the newest integration features, and you can now download the new Unity binary here and the Daydream plugin here.
Native UE4 integration
We’ve made significant improvements to our UE4 native integration that will help developers build better production-quality Daydream apps. The latest version introduces Daydream controller support in the editor, a neck model, new rendering optimizations, and much more. UE4 developers can download the source here.
Get started today
While the first Daydream-ready phones and headset are coming this fall, you can start developing high-quality Daydream apps right now with the Google VR SDK 1.0 and the DIY developer kit.
We’re also opening applications to our Daydream Access Program (DAP) so we can work closely with even more developers building great content for Daydream. Submit your Daydream app proposal to apply to be part of our DAP.
When you create content for the Daydream platform, you know your apps will work seamlessly across every Daydream-ready phone and headset. Daydream is just getting started, and we’re looking forward to working together to help you build new immersive, interactive VR experiences. Stay tuned for more information about Daydream-ready phones and the Daydream headset and controller coming soon.
Posted by Adam Champy, Product Manager for Google Cast SDK
Google Cast makes it easy for developers to extend their mobile experience to the most beautiful screens and speakers in the home.
At Google I/O, we announced our new Google Cast SDK. This new SDK focuses on making development for Cast quicker, more reliable, and easier to maintain. We’ve introduced full state management that helps you implement the right abstraction between your app and Google Cast. We’ve also delivered a full Cast user experience, matching the Google Cast design checklist.
Today we are releasing this SDK for Android and iOS Senders, including an introductory video, full documentation, and reference sample apps and codelab tutorials for both platforms. Initial developer feedback is that first-time implementations can save significant development time compared with our previous SDKs.
A few things we’ve announced will be coming in the next few months, including a customizable Expanded Controller and adding customization to the Mini Controller, to help accelerate development even further.
Drop by our Cast developer site to learn about the new SDK and APIs, and join our developer community on Google+ at g.co/googlecastdev to discuss this with other developers.
Posted by Nathan Martz, Product Manager, Google Cardboard
Human beings experience sound in all directions—like when a fire truck zooms by, or when an airplane is overhead. Starting today, the Cardboard SDKs for Unity and Android support spatial audio, so you can create equally immersive audio experiences in your virtual reality (VR) apps. All your users need is their smartphone, a regular pair of headphones, and a Google Cardboard viewer.
Many apps create simple versions of spatial audio—by playing sounds from the left and right in separate speakers. But with today’s SDK updates, your app can produce sound the same way humans actually hear it. For example:
We built today’s updates with performance in mind, so adding spatial audio to your app has minimal impact on the primary CPU (where your app does most of its work). We achieve these results in a couple of ways:
It’s really easy to get started with the SDK’s new audio features. Unity developers will find a comprehensive set of components for creating soundscapes on Android, iOS, Windows and OS X. And native Android developers will now have a simple Java API for simulating virtual sounds and environments.
Check out our Android sample app (for developer reference only), browse the documentation on the Cardboard developers site, and start experimenting with spatial audio today. We’re excited to see (and hear) the new experiences you’ll create!
Originally Posted on Google Apps Developers blog
Posted by Muzammil Esmail, Product Manager, Google for Work and Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps
Over the years, we’ve been updating our APIs with new versions across Drive and Calendar, as well as those used for managing Google Apps for Work domains. These new services offer developers improvements over previous functionality and introduces new features that help Apps administrators better manage their domains.
To deliver even more granular control, today we are announcing the new Calendar Resource API as part of the Admin SDK’s Directory API that enables Google for Work customers to manage their physical resources, like conference rooms, printers, nap pods, tennis courts, walkstations, etc. These physical resources can be added to meetings by end users as needed. The API released today replaces the GDATA Calendar Resource API, so we encourage developers to begin moving their applications and tools to the new API. Please note that we will begin deprecation in January 2016 and sunset the existing API in January 2017. Stay tuned for a formal deprecation announcement with details.
