If you put a virtual work of art in the real world for everyone to see — say, a beautiful sculpture in a park — you wouldn’t want it to disappear overnight. That’s why Google’s upgrading its ARCore augmented reality platform with what it’s calling a “save button” for AR, to store the locations of your creations indefinitely. So the next time someone thinks to whip out their phone in that same park, they could see the wonderful things you’ve left behind.
Technically, the feature is known as “Persistent Cloud Anchors,” and it’s not a new idea: Microsoft’s upcoming Minecraft Earth game uses the company’s own Azure Spatial Anchors, which also last a while.
But until today, Google’s version only stuck around for 24 hours and was mostly…