In case you’ve ever wondered about the math behind placing, say, virtual spiders on my kid works, wonder no more: my teammates have published lots o’ details.

One of the key challenges in enabling AR features is proper anchoring of the virtual content to the real world, a process referred to as tracking. In this paper, we present a system for motion tracking, which is capable of robustly tracking planar targets and performing relative-scale 6DoF tracking without calibration. Our system runs in real-time on mobile phones and has been deployed in multiple major products on hundreds of millions of devices.

You can play with the feature via Motion Stills for Android and Playground for Pixel phones. 

Here’s an… appetizing one? The LA Times is offering “an augmented reality check on our favorite burgers.”

I’ve gotta say, they look pretty gnarly in 3D (below). I wonder whether these creepy photogrammetry(?)-produced results are net-appealing to customers. I have the same question about AR clothing try-on: even if we make it magically super accurate, do I really want to see my imperfect self rocking some blazer or watch, or would I rather see a photo of Daniel Craig doing it & just buy the dream that I’ll look similar?

Fortunately, I found the visual appearance much more pleasing when rendered in AR on my phone vs. when rendered in 3D on my Mac, at least unless I zoomed in excessively.

Let’s get upside down, baby. The AR tracking & rendering tech we’ve been making is bringing printed ads to life:

Inside the NYT, readers will find a full page ad in the Main News section and quarter page ads both in Arts and Business sections of the paper with a CTA encouraging readers to scan the ads with Google Lens, where they might find that things are stranger than they seem. 🙃

Tangentially related: this is bonkers:

This is amazing—Stranger Things 3's Starcourt Mall wasn't a sound stage. It was all built inside an actual dying mall in Georgia. And the set designers made more than simple storefronts—they made FULL INTERIORS, even for stores that were never seen on-screen… pic.twitter.com/v5RahFLPeR

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) July 11, 2019

Clever & dirt simple:

EasyJet has launched a brand new hand luggage app that enables customers to check their bag size before they leave for the airport. The technology offers 3D augmented reality and shows if the baggage will fit the cabin bag dimensions correctly.

[Via Jacob Sharf]