Google builds its cross-platform multiplayer AR tech into a doodling app

At Google I/O earlier this month, the company announced Cloud Anchors, a tool that shares 3D data captured by a user’s smartphone with the cloud and can match that data up with another user to create a shared AR experience where each person’s phone is seeing the same things in the same places.

Today, Google is rolling out Cloud Anchor functionality to its AR drawing app called Just a Line which it released a couple months ago. Just a Line is hardly a breakout hit for Google, but the simplistic app that lets users paint the 3D world with a white line offers a nice testbed for early AR functionality that’s just as experimental.

What will likely differentiate Google’s offering from whatever Apple ends up shipping is that the Cloud Anchors is cross-platform. The Just a Line app is available on both Android and iOS, and with today’s update users on both platforms will be able to collaborate and view items in a shared space.

Google wants to bring multiplayer AR to iOS and Android with its new Cloud Anchors tool

What’s generally important about multiplayer AR experiences is making the process simple enough for users to sync their spatial map with another user so that they see the same digital objects in the same physical locations. What Google has built seems a bit cumbersome with each user needing to stand next to each other to pair their environments. It also seems that the functionality is limited to two people at the moment.

Just a Line isn’t the most high stakes place for Google to be dropping this feature, so there is clearly room for the company to keep updating what they’ve got as they see what early usage looks like.