These AR apps let you have an interactive experience of virtual things with the real world

Augmented Reality is a high technology to consume digital content in combination with real-world environments. Best of all, you don’t need to use an external device or headset to get it to work. AR uses the camera of your smartphone to overlay virtual contents in digital form on top of the real things to get the perspective view and essential information in the perception of the real world. It opens the door of many new ways for education, communications, shopping, entertainment, and more.

What are the best augmented reality apps for android?

Augmented reality makes it possible to do many things, such as projecting 3D interactive models of physical stuff from fitting furniture in your room to go outside and catch a pokemon. Let’s check out some of the best AR apps.

Civilisations AR

The most significant use of augmented reality is in the field of education. The Civilisations AR app from the BBC is an excellent educational app for history lovers to learn about various historical artifacts. Users can view the 3d models of 30 ancient artifacts, including an Egyptian mummy, Rodin’s The Kiss, iconic sculptures, many masterpieces by famous artists, and more. The app lets you locate, rotate, and resize the models as you see fit them on the screen with your surrounding.

Explore the origins of these cultural treasures and discover many little known facts with features like magic Spotlight, audio guides, and x-ray functions to see hidden secrets beneath the arts. This is a great app to experience a virtual museum right on your smartphone.

DEVAR

Devar is a great app for children that allows parents to do many fun activities with the kids. Play AR games with interactive characters, take photos with cute animals, let them draw and animate, time travel through history, or educate them about our solar system.

It also has a vast catalog of books, cards, and toys and what they call the 4D Encyclopedia to expand kids’ knowledge on various things with interactive visuals. There is a monthly subscription option available for more exceptional content.

Google Lens

Google Lens is the redesigned and improved version of Google Goggles that lets you point your camera to any object and get more information about it. Search for anything through the lens of your smartphone and get suggestions for shopping, alternative products or get information about a landmark, extract texts such as an address, phone number, date and time of an event, etc.

You can also quickly identify a plant or an animal, scan barcodes, or even try out a new outfit for yourself.

Big Bang AR

Let’s go back to nearly fourteen billions year ago and take an epic journey to know how our universe was born from the Big Bang. The app takes you to the epic journey to experience how our solar system’s formation. You can get all the detailed information and even experiment creating atoms and particles, explode a star and see the earth right on your palm.

Big Bang AR is the result of a collaboration of the European Organization for Nuclear Research and Google Arts & Culture.

Google Translate

Google Translate lets users translate text between more than a hundred languages. You can input text by typing, handwriting, and upload an image that has texts. This is not a dedicated AR app; however, it has some augmented reality elements that allow you to point the camera to any text for translations. It is particularly helpful when visiting different places in aboard. The app also lets you translating bilingual conversations in real-time as you speak with a foreign person.

Google Translate supports handwriting in 95 languages, image in 50 languages, and conversations in 43 languages. In addition, it supports more than 50 languages in offline mode.

SketchAR

SketchAR is a unique drawing app to bring out the artistic person hidden in yourself. Learn and improve your drawing skill by practicing with the help of this app. Place a paper on the table and chose your subject on the app, SketchAR will project a virtual image that you can start tracing.

It works very well if you can hold the phone steadily and helps to learn various line drawing techniques. There are hundreds of guided lessons for drawing various objects, anime characters, arts, and graffitis that are useful for not only beginners but for professionals as well.

Assemblr EDU

Assemblr is a fantastic educational app for students and teachers to make the learning process better and fun with 3D & Augmented Reality (AR) contents. It’s an excellent platform for teachers to create interactive presentations with photos, videos, and texts. Besides, students can also learn many topics using existing free lessons and modules. The virtual classroom lets place 3d objects in front of participants, lets them create and share projects, and more.

Playground

Formerly known as AR Stickers, Playground form Google lets you create a new kind of Animoji called Playmoji. Add cute characters and objects on your photos and videos, interact with them, and have fun. The app is smart enough to know the environment on your camera screen and suggests the most suitable items to make the moments more alive. You can apply fun stickers, add captions, and animate them for engaging visual stories.

AR Ruler App

AR Ruler is a useful app to get a measure and know the distance between two ends. It’s a straightforward app yet perfect example of how AR can be very productive in everyday life. Surprisingly, AR Ruler capable of measuring angles, volume, Height, and area rather than just simple straight measurements.

The app might not give you pinpoint accuracy, but it gets the job done perfectly for DIY projects. It also has an on-screen ruler to measure tiny objects.

IKEA Place

IKEA Place lets you virtually style your room by fitting furniture from the massive catalog of IKEA products. Get an idea of the look before buying the actual item. Using ARCore technology, the app lets you get an accurate impression of designs, colors, and different sizes of furniture with 3D and true-to-scale models. You can also use the visual search to point the camera to an existing piece of equipment and get results for matching items in a similar style. Design your perfect room for exceptional functionality.

Multiple tech giants are today focused on AR technology, and we hope to see more and more augmented reality apps. Share your suggestions in the comments if you discover a useful app.