Early creations with Google’s ARCore are taking off

Recently Google launched the ARCore 1.0 to give developers the ability to build augmented reality apps that make the user's phone's camera smarter.

It works on over 100 million Android devices, on more than a dozen different device models, so more people can use AR to interact with the world in new ways.

While it's only been a few weeks since launch, developers are already publishing new ARCore experiences on Google Play, across gaming, shopping and home, and creativity.

For gaming, AR weaves the action right into the world around users, making the experience more immersive and unlocking a whole new way to play.

BANDAI NAMCO has released "My Tamagotchi Forever," an experience in which players can raise Tamagotchi characters while building Tamatown, a virtual town that users can play with in the real world.

Another example is TendAR, a game that features Guppy, a virtual fish that responds to users' facial expressions and survives by "eating" other people's emotions.

The game was created by combining ARCore with Google Cloud APIs, which provides computer vision and object recognition.

TendAR will be available to download starting in July 2018.

Augmented reality can also bring anything into the user's space, which helps when in trying to understand the size and scale of things before users buy or ship them.

Over the last few months, Google has been tinkering with experiments that show how AR can be used as a new creative medium for self-expression.

They've worked with creators across different disciplines to explore what happens when AR is used by illustrators, choreographers, animators and more.

You can see some of the results here:

Google is open sourcing the core code of the app so developers can use it as a starting point for their own ARCore projects.

Anyone with an ARCore-enabled phone can jump into most of these experiences from the Play Store.