Ondrej Holzman During WWDC, packed with new software and hardware, it was quite easy to miss some of Apple's news. Or at least not paying enough attention to them. And this is especially the case with the ARKit platform, with which Apple brings augmented reality into the hands of millions of people around the world. The implications are quite significant…
Augmented reality (AR) has been talked about more and more in recent years, but it has usually been out of reach for most customers. And above all in the sense of real use, which AR has not yet been able to bring outside of some games and a few applications.
However, augmented reality has one big advantage over virtual reality, which is even more unattainable, because you need at least a headset and powerful machines. Much less is needed for augmented reality, and this is where Apple now comes into play with its ARKit platform – it has the potential to bring augmented reality to millions of users, not just for its own sake.
What ARKit is all about
ARKit is essentially and very simply a solution for realistic placement of 3D objects in the real world through the viewfinder of your iPhone or iPad. The fact that it will all happen via iPhone or iPad, which are constantly in the hands of millions of users around the world, is the most important thing in all of this. Augmented reality is nothing new, it's just that no one has yet succeeded in mass expanding it, and Apple has a great opportunity to be the first again.
Developers have already started working with the ARKit developer tools and are the first swallows in the world. Apple makes it much easier for them to develop applications connected to augmented reality thanks to ARKit. This platform uses a technology called Visual Inertial Odometry, with which it tracks the world around the iPhone or iPad, while allowing these products to perceive how they are moving through space.
ARKit automatically analyzes how the room you are in looks like, finds out where horizontal surfaces such as tables or floors are located, and then manages to place virtual objects on them. ARKit captures everything using cameras, processors, and motion sensors, so it can capture geometry and light in different scenes. Thanks to this, individual applications can, for example, attach a selected object to the ground, which will remain in the given place, even if you turn the viewfinder elsewhere.
It may not sound very appealing in theory and maybe even incomprehensible to some, but once you see everything in practice, you will quickly understand how everything works or can work in the future.
Pokemon GO is just the beginning
In addition, we don't have to go too far from the apple world for what a properly implemented extended can do. It was 2016 when the world has been gripped by the Pokémon GO phenomenon and millions of people ran after virtual pokemons that appeared on the iPhone screen in parks, in trees, in the streets or quietly at home on the couch.
In the case of Pokémon GO, it was the use of AR for the purpose of a better and, above all, a more unique and, for many, hitherto unknown gaming experience. However, the potential of augmented reality is much greater, although we can expect, especially at the beginning, that AR will be used a lot in games. Also thanks to the fact that Apple cooperates with the Unity and Unreal game engines within ARKit.
For now, developers are mainly playing around with augmented reality on iPhones and iPads, but the first examples are starting to appear that make you think this could really be big. A good example is the developer Adam Debreczeni, co-founder of the bicycle marketplace Velo, who decided to model his route, which he had previously cycled, in AR.
My bike ride in AR. (Unity + ARKit + Mapbox + Strava) pic.twitter.com/g2uVwVlM3h
— Adam Debreczeni (@heyadam) June 7, 2017
Debreczeni "took up" ARKit, the Unity engine, map materials from Mapbox and data from the Strava application for recording the route, wrote a few lines of code, and the result was that he was able to project his entire route on a 3D map at home on the coffee table. Debreczeni then admitted that he was really impressed with ARKit, especially how the modeled map was able to hold its position even as he moved around it with his iPhone.
“The fact that Apple can do this so well in beta with one or two cameras is really incredible. It's a good indicator of how strong their AR team is now.” he said Debrecen for Mercury News. While with most other AR platforms, the developer would need multiple cameras and depth sensors, here Debreczeni only had to pick up an iPhone.
Augmented reality for everyone
Making augmented reality available to everyone was probably one of the biggest goals for Apple when it was preparing ARKit and everything related to it. It was speculated that the Californian company would enter the game with AR only with the new iPhone, which could have, for example, a 360-degree camera and therefore unique equipment for the best possible experience. But Apple went about it the other way around.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has recently emphasized several times that he is more impressed by AR than VR and that he sees enormous potential in augmented reality. That's why ARKit is as open as possible, and when iOS 11 comes out this fall, it will run on all devices with A9 chips and later, that means iPhone SE, 6S and 7, iPad Pro and this year's 9,7-inch iPad. This is a huge number of products and thus users who will be able to taste augmented reality very easily.
"The interview with Tim Cook left me with the impression that Apple has a much grander vision in store for AR," he wrote for TEAM analyst Ben Bajarin, who sees opening the platform to a large number of products as key.
Apple's head of software engineering, Craig Federighi, was not exaggerating at WWDC when he said that ARKit would become the biggest AR platform in the world. Apple has a completely unprecedented hit in this regard, which immediately catapults it into the forefront of a race it may win before it even gets off the ground. At least for now.
It's not that the competition isn't interested in augmented reality, on the contrary, but delivering it to the end user in a device they use every day, that fits in their hand, and guaranteeing smooth and simple operation, that hasn't happened yet. Google is trying something similar with the Tango project, but it only works on select Android phones that must have hardware support for it. And those are pitifully few against the apple base.
Virtual Sofa from IKEA in the living room
In the end, ARKit isn't just about augmented reality per se, it's also about Apple preparing its platform to make it as easy as possible to develop for once again – as with its entire ecosystem. The proof is the first very promising apps we've been watching for just a few weeks with the first developer tools in iOS 11.
Apple often has an advantage in developer tools, as well as the huge audience a developer can automatically reach with their new app when they submit it to the App Store. The same will now also apply to ARKit and augmented reality, which, moreover, will not only be jumped on by independent developers, but we can also expect large companies and corporations. Those in AR will surely see the potential for strengthening their business sooner or later.
An example above all is the Swedish furniture company IKEA, which has already officially jumped on the ARKit bandwagon and is preparing its own application for augmented reality. This way, customers will be able to very easily see how a specific sofa will look in their living room, for example, via their iPhone or iPad.
"This will be the first AR application to make reliable shopping decisions," said IKEA's digital transformation manager Michael Valdsgaard, who predicts that augmented reality will play a significant role in introducing new products in the future. "When we launch a new product, it will be the first to appear in the AR app."
IKEA will certainly not be alone in engaging in similar activities. For shopping, especially furniture, augmented reality makes a lot of sense. Setting up virtual furniture in your room in a few minutes on your iPad so that everything suits you, and then just drive to get it or order it online, that's the shopping of the future. And above all, shopping that will be much more efficient in the end.
Since not only furniture manufacturers already have huge libraries filled with 3D models of their own products, ARKit will now bring them the necessary tools to easily bring them to your home or wherever you need to build/imagine them.
We measure in augmented reality
But back to the smaller developers, because they are now the ones who are showing what ARKit can actually do with their first creations. One of the most impressive are measuring applications, several of which have been created and which, after a few days of development, can measure real objects very precisely. More than one developer, analyst, journalist or technology enthusiast has already spontaneously shouted out on Twitter how he was kidnapped from ARKit.
In the App Store, we can already find a lot of applications that promise you that you can use them to measure how much they measure using the iPhone camera, but the results are often more than contradictory. Augmented reality shows that we won't really need the meter anymore. And for the time being, these are only the simplest proposals, which will certainly be developed with more advanced measurement options and other activities.
[su_youtube url=”https://youtu.be/z7DYC_zbZCM” width=”640″]
For the best ARKit is making right now, stay tuned blog Made With ARKit, or his Twitter channel @madewithARKit, where all the interesting implementations come together. In addition to someone simulating a moon landing in their living room, you can also see what the popular Minecraft might look like in AR. So it looks like we have a really interesting future ahead of us.
Apple Glass?
Moreover, the interesting future does not have to concern only AR applications and new experiences for users, but also the whole of Apple. ARKit is the basic building block on which Apple can build another part of its ecosystem and potentially also build a new product within it.
It has been speculated more than once recently that Apple is playing with glasses in its laboratories as a possible next product. With glasses like Google Glass, with which (and augmented reality) Google wanted to amaze the world in 2013, but then it did not succeed at all. In short, no one was ready for such a product at the time.
Apple is now laying a very good foundation with ARKit, and many experts are already predicting that this is just the beginning of its big foray into the world of (perhaps not only) augmented reality. The Californian company would not be the first to come up with the glasses again, but it could once again be the one that manages to popularize them. The question is whether this is all the music of the distant future, or we will be walking around with augmented reality glasses instead of the iPhone in a few years. Or not at all.
