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Mirza Mohammed Ali Khan anatomizes the Asus ZenFone AR

Remember Pokemon Go? The game everyone went bonkers over about a year ago, where you point your phone camera and capture creatures as you walk around the city, is based on Augmented Reality (AR). The technology superimposes virtual images, videos, GIFs, etc on views of the real world. AR, along with Virtual Reality (VR) is touted to be the next big thing in user experience when consuming media—videos, music, images, etc.

Google’s Tango—the tech giant’s AR platform—has already started making its way to smartphones, with AR-enabled apps that help users play games, consume content, and even shop for products by virtually experiencing them on mobiles. Tango works on motion tracking as the device (in this case, the smartphone) moves in space, depth perception, detecting surfaces and sizes, and ‘learning’ the area around it.

Gadget maker Asus recently launched the Zenfone AR, a Tango-enabled smartphone. Similar to how we perceive objects and distances with our eyes, the phone can tell how far it is from objects and walls, and also remember the visual features of an environment. Thus, it can run Tango AR applications to augment surroundings with graphics and images virtually. Read more…