Month: May 2018

Enlarge (credit: The Pinball Arcade)

If you're a fan of the Bally/Williams' golden age of pinball machines, you might want to act fast to secure some great emulated facsimiles of some of the era's best tables. The Pinball Arcade has announced that the license holder for 61 Bally/Midway titles that make up the heart of the collection has declined to renew its contract. After June 30, you will no longer be able to buy those tables inside the game, though existing owners will continue to be able to play the tables, and they will still receive support, meaning there's no reason not to grab the ones you want before they're gone.

The Pinball Arcade's emulated versions of full-sized pinball tables are a great substitute for pinball fans not able (or crazy enough) to purchase their own full-sized pinball machines and for those not lucky enough to live somewhere with easy access to real playable tables (residents of Portland, Oregon, can stop reading now). The officially licensed tables on The Pinball Arcade all have the original rules and sound effects and are available on a wide range of platforms, from phones to consoles to PCs.

The physics engine can't possibly duplicate the feel of a full-sized physical game, but it does a pretty good job. The emulated tables are also a great way to learn the rules for games you might get a chance to play later in person at a local spot (those lucky Portlanders win out again).

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.—Google is launching a new version of its augmented reality platform for Android, ARCore 1.2. Version 1.2 adds support for wall detection, launching an AR experience via image recognition, a new "Sceneform" framework, and a "Cloud Anchors" feature that enables shared experiences not just across Android devices—it works on top of iOS' ARKit, too.

Google launched ARCore version 1.0 in February as its big reboot of the Project Tango augmented reality project. Where Tango was focused on special hardware with extra sensors and cameras, ARCore tries to replicate some of that functionality on a normal smartphone. ARCore doesn't work on every single Android phone; instead, it works on a model-by-model basis (mostly on flagships) and requires some work from the device manufacturer. Most of the major Android OEMs, like Samsung, LG, and OnePlus, are signed up though, and today ARCore has a supported install base of more than 100 million devices.

Any developer who wants to can make an ARCore app, which will usually involve 3D objects overlaid on a video feed. The goal of ARCore (and any AR app, really) is to do enough detection of the world to make the 3D object seem like it exists as a real object inside the video feed. On the other side of the aisle, Apple's AR framework is called ARKit. While Google started the whole AR thing first with Project Tango all the way back in 2014, Apple first brought AR to a mainstream device by rolling ARKit out for the last few years of iPhones in 2017.