Motion tracking, environment tracking, body tracking and face tracking – while they might be basic Augmented Reality (AR) capabilities, these are the technologies that allow your app to bridge the virtual world with the real world. At the core of it, what drives this brand new visually interactive user experience is the AR Engine.
Huawei launched the HMS Core 5.0 in June this year to bring Huawei’s comprehensive leading core service capabilities to developers, in return helping them elevate the user experience. One new feature is the AR Engine that offers a wide range of AR-related capabilities, giving developers the means to easily create an all-new interactive and immersive AR experience.
The project to build the HUAWEI AR Engine began, simply enough, by considering what the next generation of consumer electronics and computing platforms might look like. It’s commonly accepted that the biggest developments in the electronics industry only occur maybe once every 10 to 15 years. Mobile phones have been around since the mid-1990s – over two decades now. Since then, smartphones have now been on the market for 13 years if you count from 2007; when we saw the first real breakthrough.
So, isn’t it about time we consider exactly what the next generation of technology will look like? What will be the most important new operating systems and software technology for new consumer electronics? And what will the user interaction be like with this new generation of products? It’s high time the electronics industry reflected on its changing business models, as well as changes in the habits of its users.
To answer some of these questions, Huawei tasked numerous research teams with conducting a range of comprehensive studies on the industry. After long periods of research and discussion, these teams identified AR as one of the most important new directions the electronics industry will take. After months of discussion and planning that involved even top management, Huawei engineers are now on a mission to commercialise an AR Engine.
The development team debated at great length on the potential scope of applications this new technology might have. This began with a discussion on the traditional uses of AR to date; functions like Simultaneous Location and Mapping (SLAM), light estimation, image recognition and tracking being the most notable examples. We then launched a systematic development of new algorithms, optimising performance at the system- and chip-level to improve key factors like accuracy, reliability, performance and power consumption. Finally, with the launch of the HUAWEI P20 at the 2018 Huawei Developer Conference (HDC), we were ready to release the first ever commercially available version of our new AR Engine on the HiSilicon Kirin 970.
Following that, at the launch of the HUAWEI Mate 20, we provided an in-depth showcasing of our AR 3D modelling software. Soon afterwards, new features such as the AR Lens and 3D Qmojis were successfully adopted into main product lines by both Huawei and Honour.
However, initial research returned with mixed feedback and confusion about some of these features. Established industry experts claimed that AR was yet to establish itself as a truly stand-out feature of any smartphone. Indeed, many applications of the technology were slow to take off. As an example, due to limited smartphone rendering capabilities, AR 3D modelling struggled to guarantee the high levels of accuracy and precision that are needed to support a mobile display online in real-time. The perception of AR technology remained that it was just a “toy”, something confined to the periphery of the electronics industry, at least for the time being.
“We spent a lot of time thinking about these challenges. That’s when we decided to orient Huawei’s AR 2.0 towards three digital technology areas: people, objects and the environment. Step by step, we then laid out four priority business areas, corresponding to the technology’s core capabilities, applications, ecosystem and Cloud solutions. Finally, the AR Engine 2.0 was successfully launched in 2019. This second generation helped to redefine the AR Engine as an intelligent geometric AI platform, but more clearly distinct from generic AI platforms both in terms of its construction and purpose.”
The AR metrics we have created have quickly become some of our users’ favourite gadget hacks, including an AR-assisted ToF camera. In a short space of time, this tool, in particular has proven extremely popular, racking up tens of millions of users every month. The AR Lens app, combining the Huawei camera and AR Engine technology, really is great fun to use. It’s no wonder, then, that it has already accumulated over 10 million MAU (monthly active users). We’ll continue polishing these two applications to provide Huawei customers with the great user experience they expect.
