Overview
When we think of AR, we think of deeply immersive, highly visual, world-locked 6DoF experiences that run smoothly on a high-end device with a fully charged battery and a fast internet connection. Prior to this year, Lens was only available for high-end smartphones equipped with AR technology frameworks, this year, Google scaled the Lens experience to devices that cost as low as $35, compressing the experience down to ~200KB, and returns results on-device with low latency.
Learn about how Lens scaled a focused AR experience to low-end devices, the challenges that came with the user, network, and device constraints, and how the team worked around to solve these problems for a magical and useful product in emerging markets.
Objective
AR experiences are not only for users with the highest end smartphones for exploratory front-camera experiences, AR can provide answers directly in the environment, can be built on lower-end devices with low quality camera resolutions and even to devices without AR frameworks, and make the camera a powerful tool in everyday life for everyone.
Target Audience
Open to everyone!
Five Things Audience Members Will Learn
- Showing the user a composited view of the environment with useful information paired with audio is augmenting the user’s reality in a useful way
- AR experiences are not only for users with the highest end smartphones with the ARCore and ARKit capabilities
- With a simple interface and delightful experience, a combination of different machine learning technology, and most importantly a deep understanding of users – the phone camera can be a powerful productivity and learning tool
- The phone camera is something users across all income levels can intuitively understand
- Designing AR experiences is hard, but designing delightful AR experiences with a lot of latency, a low quality camera, and for low functional and digital literacy users comes with a whole new set of challenges
