Google, Disney and Lucasfilm bring the Star Wars series The Mandalorian to augmented reality

Google has announced the launch of a new Android app, “The Mandalorian” AR Experience, which will showcase the iconic moments of the show’s first season in Augmented Reality, allowing fans to retrace the Mandalorian’s footsteps, find the child, harness the Force and other adventures.

In the app, users will be able to follow in the footsteps of Mando, Din Djarin and the Child, interact with the characters and create scenes to share with friends.

The new AR content will be released for the app on November 23, and will continue for nearly a year until October 31, 2021.

The app leverages Google’s ARCore developer platform to create augmented reality experiences, in order to create scenes that interact with the user’s surroundings. With this more engaging design, fans will be able to unlock additional effects based on their actions. The app also leverages Google’s new ARCore Depth API, which allows the app to enable occlusion. In this way the AR scenes blend more naturally with the environment seen through the smartphone camera.

Google says the app will only support “compatible 5G Android devices,” which includes its Google Pixel 5G smartphones and other select 5G Android phones that have updated Google Play Services for AR.

You can check if your Android phone is supported on a list provided on the Google Developers website. Other phones may be supported in the future, the company notes.

Although the experience requires a 5G compatible Android device, Google says you don’t need to be on an active 5G connection to use the app. In fact, the requirement is more about the technologies that these devices include than the signal itself.

Google has partnered with Lucasfilm many times over the past few years for promotional marketing campaigns. For example, Google allowed users to give its apps a Star Wars-themed makeover in 2015, for the benefit of their services like Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and others. It has also introduced AR and VR experiences with Star Wars content in recent years.

Mandalorian AR Experience can be downloaded for free from the Play Store.

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