Google, in its ever-passionate quest to make augmented reality an everyday tech standard, has just unveiled its next big step: a comprehensive free course on building augmented reality experiences. If you are an Android user and are interested in learning more about AR and how you could be developing AR content, there are good news: free AR lessons are now available.
Created by Google and now available via Coursera, Introduction to Augmented Reality and ARCore is a four-week course that teaches about AR tech in general, what it is, how it works, and guides aspiring developers on how to get started with developing augmented reality experiences.
As a regular ARPost reader, I’m pretty sure that you are quite familiar with AR already, and are probably in the loop with some of the current platforms that augmented reality apps are popularly developed for. Thus, a considerable portion of the course might seem very tempting to just gloss over. However, there is perhaps still merit in taking the full course with the knowledge it has to offer. After all, it is free for anyone to enroll in.
That is because it is technically more than a gateway towards an AR development career. It is in a literal sense, a glimpse on how far AR has truly come as an industry. We’re not in Hyper Reality yet, of course, but there is a definite open path that might lead its ubiquity. This is perhaps most evident especially in the gaming realm, which is widely considered today as the most popular application of augmented reality.
Time investment-wise, Google’s AR learning course takes about 15 hours to complete, and is stuffed with videos, periodic assignments and quizzes for you to learn everything that you need. The curriculum starts with a beginner-friendly tour of AR concepts, moving towards the introduction of augmented reality experiences and applications. It then sends the students off to be familiarized with various AR tools and platforms, eventually tracing the steps towards creating their very own ARCore-based augmented reality apps.
Needless to say, this course will be focused on ARCore as the base app development platform, but it will still nonetheless cover a wide variety of potential discussion topics when it comes to other popular platforms.
The Google’s AR Course starts on July 16, and as mentioned, it’s completely free. You also have the option to earn an official Course Certificate, though for that you’d need to pay about $29/€24 for the course.
