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Ask HN: Any way to test Google ARCore without a supported device?

28 points by nkkollaw ↗ HN
I'm wondering if there's any way to test Google ARCore without a supported device (Pixel or Galaxy S8).

I have a Moto G5 Plus, perhaps there's some simulator that can pretend it's another phone..?

14 comments

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JulesRosser
Emulated devices won't work I'm afraid. I've just checked, and the SDK checks against a list of device fingerprints: i.e. return Build.fingerprint.contains(sailfish || marlin || walleye...)

However, this check is made from the HelloArActivity and could be bypassed. It may still fail, but I'd be happy to build an APK with the supported devices check commented out if you'd like.

As a side note, I've been playing with the sample SDK, but it's a slow process due to the lack of documentation. Does anyone know of any communities for sharing info on ArCore?

Thanks in advance

nkkollaw
> the SDK checks against a list of device fingerprints: i.e. return Build.fingerprint.contains(sailfish || marlin || walleye...)

Yes, that's what I thought, I guess they just do it to ease debugging since my phone is just or almost as capable as the Galaxy S8. So, `HelloArActivity` could be patched so that everything worked on other devices?

> It may still fail, but I'd be happy to build an APK with the supported devices check commented out if you'd like.

Is that the only file? So one can just download the SDK and comment that out?

> As a side note, I've been playing with the sample SDK, but it's a slow process due to the lack of documentation. Does anyone know of any communities for sharing info on ArCore?

Well, there's this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Arcore/, but it's new and I doubt is that active. Perhaps you could fork Google's project on GitHub and edit the—almost non-existing—instructions in the README?

ditn
Yes, someone has stripped the device check and ported it to unsupported devices https://github.com/tomthecarrot/arcore-for-all
chris2112
I have a G5 Plus as well and unfortunately the Tango Core service crashes when the app opens.
[dead] Allower
imagine that, it doesnt work on an unsupported device, shocking!
nkkollaw
...what are the steps you followed to even try running it?

I was able to install the modified ARCore APK, but I wasn't able to install the browser.

mlevental
in that same repo is the helloar apk
kakali
This likely won't work too well because the Pixel and S8 are the only ones they have camera and imu calibration for. If you do hack it to get it working, you should at expect degraded performance or complete failure.
nkkollaw
But Google is saying that it's optimized for a wide variety of devices...
kakali
Yeah, but not in the first release.