Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles [MUSIC PLAYING] EITAN MARDER-EPPSTEIN: How's everyone doing today? Yeah? Good. All right. Well, welcome to Google I/O. My name is Eitan Marder-Eppstein. And I am an engineering manager here at Google. And I work on augmented reality. And I'm going to take a few polls throughout this talk. And the first one is how many of you are familiar with augmented reality in general? OK. Every time I give a talk like this, more hands go up, which is a really, really great thing. And today, what I'm going to do is give a quick refresher about augmented reality for those of you who maybe aren't quite as familiar with it, and especially how augmented reality relates to smartphones, which is something that we're really, really excited about here at Google. And then I'm going to talk about some of the things that we're doing at Google to improve our platform for augmented reality and the capabilities that we give to some of these devices. All right. So I need my clicker. So I'm actually going to go over here to get the presentation started. But off we go. So smartphone AR stems from this observation that over the last decade, our phones have gotten immensely more powerful, CPUs and GPUs have improved a lot. But the ability of phones to see and understand their environments, and really make sense of the world around them, until very recently was largely unchanged and limited. So if you pointed your phone at this table, it would allow you to take a picture of the table or even a video of your friend climbing over the table. But your phone wouldn't really have an understanding of the geometry of the table, of its position relative to the table as it moves through space. And so what augmented reality seeks to do on smartphones is to take all of this amazing advancement in computing power and leverage it to bring new capabilities to your phone, and to take your phone from beyond just the screen, beyond its own little box, to expand it to understanding the world around it. So now, when my phone looks at this table, it can see that there's a surface there, that there are chairs next to it. And as I move through the environment, my phone can actually track its position as it moves. And we think at Google that augmented reality is really exciting. And we've been excited to see some of the stuff that you've built. And we've categorized it into two main buckets where we think augmented reality can be really, really great for applications. So the first bucket is we think that augmented reality can be useful on smartphones. So recently, I was remodeling my kitchen. All right, another poll-- how many of you have remodeled anything in a house? All right. So if you've done that, you know that measurements is a real pain. And what I needed to do was measure for a backsplash. We were buying some subway tile for our kitchen. And I, instead of taking a tape measure out, actually pulled out my phone, went to my counter, and measured from point A to B to C. And I did all of that without moving any of my appliances where I would have normally had to move in order to get an accurate measurement with my tape measure. So AR can be useful in that way, just from providing a better geometric understanding about your environment. AR can also be useful for shopping applications. So recently, we had some very old chairs at my house. And my partner and I were looking to replace them, kind of like these chairs here. And we were getting into a debate over which chairs we liked more. And so with augmented reality, we were able to take a 3D model of a chair, place it in the environment, see the exact size and scale and color. And we could have our arguments about inevitably what kind of chair we would have at home rather than exposing everyone to it at the store, and be more targeted about how we made our purchase and even buy this furniture online and feel much more comfortable with it. So that's how AR can just provide more utility in your daily life. But AR can also be fun. So imagine a character running across the floor, jumping onto this chair, and jumping onto this table, or me sitting in one of these chairs and having the floor drop out from under me to create an ice fishing game. Ice fishing sounds a little bit boring, but I can tell you that in this game, it's actually a lot of fun. And AR can also be used for creative expression. So here, now in your pocket, you have a lot of ability to go out and create new things that were previously only capable to be created by professionals. So you can generate computer-generated content on the go, on the fly. You can take your favorite character and put them into your scene, and have your friend pose next to them. Or you can take pizza or hot dogs or your favorite food items, as we showed here, and put them on the table in front of you. But now, you have this amazing video editing capability in your pocket. And for those of you who have seen our AR Stickers application on the Google Pixel phone, you know what I'm talking about. And for those who haven't, please check it out. It's really, really cool to have this creation power in your pocket. All right. So that's great. AR can be useful. AR can be fun. But how do you actually build applications for AR? How do you get involved as developers? This is a developer conference. So how many of you are familiar with ARCore, when I say ARCore? All right, about half of you. So ARCore is Google's development platform for augmented reality. We want to make it easy for you to build applications that take advantage of these new capabilities that phones provide, of the ability of phones to see and understand their environments, and to build applications that actually react to this understanding. And ARCore was launched a few months ago. And it provides three main capabilities to allow you to do this. The first is something we call motion tracking. So here, consider the example of taking the Scarecrow from "The Wizard of Oz" and wanting to place the Scarecrow at a taco stand and make it seem like he's waiting in line for tacos because everyone loves tacos. So here, if I look at the Scarecrow with my phone, ARCore actually understands its position relative to a virtual object that I've placed in space. So as I move a meter forward, the phone knows that I've moved a meter in this direction. And as I turn left, the phone also knows that. It's able to track its motion as I move through space. And now, if I combine that with my desire to place the Scarecrow a meter in front of me, I can put the Scarecrow right here. And as I move my phone around, I can change where I'm rendering the Scarecrow in the virtual scene to match my physical environment. So that allows you to register virtual objects to your physical scene in a very natural and intuitive way. The second capability that ARCore provides is something called lighting estimation. So here, continuing our "Wizard of Oz" theme, we've got the Cowardly Lion. And when you turn off the lights, say we want to make the lion afraid because it's cowardly.