What you need to know
- Google is bringing the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park to your living room with AR.
- Google has also added effects like growling and roaring to increase immersion.
- It works on any ARCore enabled phone.
With ARCore, Google has supported viewing augmented reality versions of common animals like wolves and horses in Search, but now it's adding the scaly dinosaurs that we all know and love.
As part of a partnership with Universal, it's bringing some of the most fun dinosaurs from Jurassic Park to your garden with AR.
Google says you can view the following dinosaurs with AR; Tyrannosaurus Rex, Velociraptor, Triceratops, Spinosaurus, Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Dilophosaurus, Pteranodon, and Parasaurolophus. Google even adds effects like roaring and stomping to increase immersion.
Ignoring that Pteranodons aren't dinosaurs, one of the largest issues Google faced here was one of scale. It's easy to see a wolf or a tiger in actual size in your backyard, but a Brachiosaurus? Google says that it's added a new auto-scaling feature which automatically resizes the dinosaur so that it's viewable as you move. It'll automatically be resized to fit any space for it.
You can find these dinosaurs by searching for either the generic term "dinosaur", or any of the 10 dinosaurs Google lists either on the Google search app or on the browser of any device running Android 7 and above. Naturally, you'll need an ARCore enabled device to view them in augmented reality, otherwise, you'll just be able to see them in 3D. Both £D and AR are available in Chrome and Safari for iPhones running iOS 11 or above.
