Google ARCore

ARCore is Google's augmented reality SDK, offering cross platform APIs for Android, iOS, Unity and the web, with motion tracking, anchors, environmental understanding, depth understanding and light estimation as fundamentals, plus a Geospatial API, Scene Semantics and a recording and playback API.

The Geospatial API is what separates ARCore from every other framework in this category and it is a genuine structural advantage. Content can be attached to any area mapped by Google Street View, which means a developer places an object at a real world location rather than relative to the user's device, and it stays there for everyone who visits. Google states this works across over 100 countries.

That capability exists because Google spent fifteen years driving cameras down public roads, and it is not something a competitor can decide to build. Nobody else has a global visual map of the built environment precise enough to localise a phone against, which is why persistent city scale AR is realistic on ARCore in a way it is not elsewhere.

Scene Semantics uses machine learning to recognise common objects in a scene, which raises the ceiling from knowing that a flat surface exists to knowing that it is a road, a building or a sky. The recording and playback API is a quieter but practically important feature, since testing AR normally means physically walking around, and being able to replay a captured session turns that into a repeatable test.