Google’s Mandalorian AR experience » Stuff

Google’s Artificial Reality (AR) tech isn’t revolutionising anything in the eye of the consumer, but it’s no doubt bringing small moments of joy into our homes. Most recently, Google met up with Disney to create the ultimate Star Wars fan’s AR experience featuring The Mandalorian and Baby Yoda.

The Mandalorian AR experience brings a virtual bounty hunter into your home, giving users the ability to interact with the characters in AR and capture scenes. You’ll be able to place scale-sized characters in your living room, garden or wherever your WiFi reaches, really. 

Built on Google’s ARCore platform, the AR experience is developed to enable something called occlusion. This is the process used to block the virtual image when something in the real world ‘blocks’ its view. You know, like a toddler, cat or unruly housemate. 

“Google worked with Disney and Lucasfilm to build models and animations based mostly on the hit Disney Plus show’s first season. New episodes of the experience will come to the app weekly, however, so it’s likely Season 2 will soon be part of the experience,” The Verge reports. 

Will it work on any phone? Not really. The Mandalorian AR experience will only run on supported 5G-enabled Android devices, but you won’t need an active 5G connections. Apparently, Google is planning on rolling it out to more devices in future, but for now, supported devices are pretty limited. It is, however, free to download on the Google Play Store.