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Google ARCore Geospatial Creator: How it works

Google ARCore Geospatial Creator: How it works

Chukwuemeka Okparaeke
July 27, 2023

What is Geospatial Creator

Geospatial Creator

Geospatial Creator, powered by ARCore and the Google Maps Platform, empowers developers and creators alike to visualize, build, and launch robust and engaging 3D digital content in real-world locations through Photorealistic 3D Tiles.

Geospatial Creator helps you build world-anchored, cross-platform experiences on supported devices on both Android and iOS. Everything you create in Geospatial Creator can be experienced in the physical world through real time localization and real world augmentation.

Geospatial Creator brings the world into your editor in a way that allows you to make your creations possible. This is done by selecting a location, getting the 3D geometry in an area, and lets you fly through the space as you would on Google Earth. Use this 3D view of the world to preview and develop your augmented reality experience.

Reference: https://developers.google.com/ar/geospatialcreator

What are the Use Cases of Geospatial Creator

What Geospatial Creator does well is making the creation of Location-based AR very easy. From the little exposure, I have gotten from creating the simple demo,

All you have to do is pick a location in the world, get the Longitude and Latitude of that location enter those values into the project, the Geospatial Creator will create a digital representation or photorealistic tile of the map of that location.

With the photorealistic map, you can easily place and position any virtual content in such a location.

So what are the possible use cases?

From the top of my head, here are what I think this could be used for;

Improved Augmented Reality tour of the real-world location:

We can take Tourism as an example. Instead of building an AR experience that uses image tracking to showcase a 3D mini-map of a Location, we can easily build a location-based AR tour where we can convert the whole area into a canvas and place virtual content around different Point-of-Interest and also place navigation systems that will literally take tourists around the city and give them a proper tour of the city.

2. Navigation system

Anything involving location also involves navigation. The system can be used to create a navigation system for a particular place.

The normal Google map that we have deals with public roads and pathways. What if you have, let's say, an outdoor event center that is big, You can create a simple navigation system for that space that will make it easy for people within that space to move around from place to place, similar to how an indoor navigation system works.

3. Game or Activity in a particular Venus

I want to use Pokemon Go, but not really that. With the Geospatial Creator, you can pick a location (maybe a park) and create a game scene using that location. When people come to that location and use your AR app, they are able to play whatever game you have created for that location.

How to setup Geospatial Creator for Unity

To get started with Geospatial Creator for Unity you have to do the following;

Note: I will not go into a lot of details because you can find everything you need to know from the Youtube video from the Google ARCore team: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDcyG9MAMAo

Step 1:

Set up a new Unity project and give it a name. Go to Window > Package Manager and Install the following

Unity AR Foundation
ARCore XR Plugin
ARKit XR Plugin

Step 2:

Download the ARCore Extension and import it into your Unity project. You can follow the link: https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/unity-arf/getting-started-extensions#bundled-dependencies

Follow the tutorial in the link to set up the ARCore Extension once you download the Unity package.

Step 3:

Download the Cesium Unity package from their GitHub page. They are a third-party platform that Google Maps is using to create the photorealistic tiles of the map in Unity.

Follow the link: https://github.com/CesiumGS/cesium-unity/releases/

Step 4:

Go back to Windows > Package Manager, and locate the ARCore Extension you just imported. Under the sample section, you will find “Geospatial Sample.”. Import it into your project. It will serve as the template to build your Location-based AR using Geospatial Creator.

Please note that the Youtube video above explains all these things, so you can just go there and follow the tutorial.

Step 5

Go to your Google Cloud Platform, create a project there, and get an API key for the project. And most importantly make sure to enable the following APIs;

ARCore
Google Map tiles

These two APIs are very important. You can find them in the API Library.

Step 6:

Go to Project Settings > XR Plugin Management, then activate ARCore for Android and ARKit for iOS.

Then go to the ARCore Extension, a submenu under the XR Plugins, and make sure yours look like this

Once you have done this, you have successfully configured your project.

Step 7:

Locate the Geospatial sample scene, open it, and then right-click, once the menu opens, go to XR > AR Geospatial Creator Origin, and click on it to add it to your scene hierarchy.

Once you add the AR Geospatial Creator Origin, this is exactly what you should have:

Step 8

Click on the AR Geospatial Creator Origin, then go to the inspector, and click on “Open Geospatial Creator Quickstart”. Add the API key you got from your Google Cloud Platform into that field provided.

Once you do that, your scene will immediately be filled with the Photorealistic map tiles of the real world.

Under the Cesium Georeference script, add the Longitude and Latitude of your desired location.

Step 9

Right-click, then go to XR > AR Geospatial Creator Anchor. Click on it to add it to your scene. This script anchors your virtual object to a particular longitude and latitude you set it to.

Make sure you set the Altitude Type to - “Terrain”, It is very very important.

Step 10:

Add your virtual content as a child of the AR Geospatial Creator Anchor. And you have a simple, functioning location-based AR experience.

Alternatively, you can just import your virtual content into the scene and then attach or add the AR Geospatial Creator Anchor script as a component to your virtual content gameobject.

Any way is acceptable.