There has been a ton of hype surrounding the Google AR experience. The advancements in ARcore itself was enough to entice many. For web-based AR, Google took a step much further in the same direction. Now Google released an update that will enable developers to publish their apps that can view through AR compatible versions of Chrome and ARCore.
Google enables AR through Chrome using their own WebXR Device API. Now Google has released a WebXR Hit Test API that is available through Chrome Canary.
“This API is intended to stay in Canary for the immediate future, we want a protracted testing period because this is a very new API proposal and we want to make sure it’s both robust and right for developers.” wrote Joseph Medley, a technical writer at Google.
Google released an AR demo that uses this technology for educational purposes. It is called the Chacmool AR experience, where it places the Chacmool Sculpture in any environment virtually for us to examine and study.
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“The immersive nature of AR allows users to freely explore, discover and play with content, just like they can in the real world. When viewing an object in AR, as opposed to seeing it on a flat 2D screen, we are able to get a deep understanding of what we are looking at because we can see it from many different angles and distances using a very intuitive interaction model: walking around the object, and getting physically closer or further away.” Wrote former Google engineer Reza Ali, a user experience engineer, and Chris Wilson, one of Google’s current staff developer advocates.
If you want to have the Chacmool experience yourself, you only need a device that runs Android Oreo or better coupled with ARCore compatible hardware. Then you need to enable the service in your device by going to chrome://flags. There you will see the different experimental setups that Google currently runs for chrome. Then you need to enable WebXR and WebXR Hit Test to start the process.
Google has been testing and retesting ideas for web-based AR, and we see now that It is actually paying off. Since this is still an experimental project, we can look forward to seeing more advancements in the future of both native and Web-based AR.