Google ARCore gives Android users augmented reality without Tango

last week in San Francisco, Google showed me an app called Oz. Oz is a kind of augmented

reality picture book: it places animated characters from The Wizard of Oz into the physical world, as viewed through a smartphone camera. I’d tried it a few months earlier at Google I/O, running on the Tango AR platform, and the content hadn’t changed. But the experience was far more interesting — because for the first time, it could run on a phone that I use every day. This version of Oz was built on a system called ARCore, which debuts today as a limited preview. As its name suggests, ARCore is Android’s equivalent to Apple ARKit: a baked-in augmented reality platform for developers. Where Tango’s custom hardware requirements have left it languishing on mediocre smartphones, ARCore is less powerful but more accessible. It’s launching on the year-old Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S8 phones, supported by Android 7.0 Nougat as well as its recently released successor Android Oreo. An official launch is loosely planned for this winter, when Google promises ARCore will work with 100 million existing and upcoming devices.                                                                                                                         https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/29/16219696/google-arcore-augmented-reality-platform-announce-release-pixel-samsung