Childish Gambino is taking his “Pharos” multimedia franchise to a new platform: Donald Glover’s alter ego released a “Pharos” augmented reality (AR) app for Android phones Wednesday morning, with an iOS version forthcoming at a later time.
The app allows users to open up an AR portal in their living room (or where ever else they happen to be), and then step into the outer space world of “Pharos.” Once in space, they can unlock several elements of the song with the help of some mystical dancers, until it is finally time for a musical lift-off.
The whole thing is very spacey, and stays true to Childish Gamibo’s other “Pharos” projects. In the past, Gamino has used the “Pharos” franchise for a series of live performances that utilized 360-degree video projections in planetarium-like video domes.
What sets the AR experience apart from other AR audio apps is that it comes with a multi-player option, giving multiple users a chance to enter the experience together. To facilitate this, the app is using Google’s Cloud Anchor technology, which is essentially the company’s take on the AR cloud — a way to share an AR layer across multiple users, and have them experience the same visual objects in the same space across all of their phones.