ARCore

What do you like best?

The plane, feature point and environmental light estimation features are great out the box for fast-tracking basic AR experiences.

Developer samples for Unity game engine have been very useful also for quick iterative development of AR experiences and apps

Image tracking is reliable and easy to set up for image tracking based AR experiences

Facial tracking is reliable and robust using the Augmented Faces features to track a user's face using smartphone cameras

What do you dislike?

ARCore feature sets are behind ARKit, where ARkit has capability for human occlusion, human body tracking and also ARCore does not support Vulkan rendering which has limited our capacity to use it on projects that would benefit from Vulkan. There needs to be more standardization of ARCore/ARKit features for us developers as this holds back the whole AR development as a whole.

Google Mediapipe looks to be a better replacement for ARCore long-term, I don't get why Mediapipe and ARCore aren't merged. If we could unlock features like ARcore on more devices which are not supported by ARCore it would benefit development and usability of our applications.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Consider whether you need ARCore-specific features or AR standard features that are available across ARCore/ARKit

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Consumer AR-app functionality on a wide range of Android devices - now ARcore is well established as the standard for Android AR.

Environment lighting and depth estimation in the newest release have unlocked better grounding of 3d objects in AR for our app users

Any experience where we rely on an image, a point in the user's space or environmental understanding to ground and realize the user experience within a user's space.

Facial recognition through ARCore has helped us make apps for cosmetic and accessory try-ons by augmenting 3d and 2d content over the user's face or body.