With its upcoming line of Pixel 6 phones, teased on Monday months before the fall release, Google demonstrated just how much it is prioritizing artificial intelligence-powered improvements over AR-focused enhancements. It’s one way Google is differentiating the phones from Apple, which has gone all-in on new AR capabilities on the iPhone thanks to its use of Lidar depth sensors.
This doesn’t mean that Google is sleeping on AR, though. If anything, the Pixel’s focus on AI suggests Google is confident in its current suite of AR apps, which are geared more toward the kind of information processing that AI helps with.