9 ms·

How ARKit 2 works, and why Apple is so focused on AR

93 points by awat 8y ago

giancarlostoro 8y ago
Seems like AR is a lot more approachable than VR in that you don't have to strap on so much gear to immerse yourself into a Virtual Based / Enhanced reality. Even Snap seems to be invested in AR if you think about it, how many snaps don't feature some augmented visuals? If people go crazy over that to the point that Facebook, and even iOS steals that type of AR functionality, there must be more to AR than meets the eye. To a computer geek it may not seem impressive now, but to the average person it casually sneaks up into their everyday life.
- koboll 8y ago
  Definitely. I think Apple really envisions something like this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs ...being the future, and they want to get ahead of it.
  - zeristor 8y ago
    I think that video is more of a warning about the dangers of cognitive overload, cybersecurity, and estrangement. It looks impressive whilst also being oppressive.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >It looks impressive whilst also being oppressive. That's an apt description of the technological future in general...
- ghaff 8y ago
  It seems as if VR is one of those things where getting to 90% isn't very useful for most people and even if you get to essentially 100% (wireless, usable with mainstream processing power, comfortable lightweight goggles), it may not be all that interesting outside of some niches like certain types of gaming or virtual worlds. A lot of the time people don't want to be immersed. AR, on the other hand, is very amenable to incremental development. You don't need a Google Glass 2.0 with all the technical and social challenges associated with that. A phone that you can point at something and get information about it is already useful.
  - oldcynic 8y ago
    I think VR is forever destined to be a niche sideline. Seems like I've been hearing that VR is about to take off every few years since the 90s. It resolutely fails to do so and aside from some "wow" at tech demos and games there's no killer VR app that makes it a must have. AR is much more instantly obvious to all with things like Night Sky and augmented maps.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      In some ways, you could almost argue that VR (and immersive experiences generally) has garnered less interest as it's become closer to reality. The Kinect is gone. The Wii fad is over. The VR devices that do exist have pretty much highlighted the difficulty of creating fully immersive experiences, especially in a typical home environment. And, as you say, there's really been nothing that makes the typical or even not so typical person go "I gotta get some of that VR." I suppose we may get there someday but it may also be one of those things that it seemed logical to assume people would want (and many thought they did), but they mostly don't.
  - jayd16 8y ago
    Seems to me, good AR takes as much or more compute work than good VR. You say "oh it runs on any old phone" but with the exception of a way to strap it to your face, if your phone can do really low latency image tracking then it most likely can do a simple VR scene too. The proof is in the pudding, isn't it? We have way more VR games than AR apps, don't we?
- DRW_ 8y ago
  They offer fundamentality different experiences so I'm not sure we should be grouping them together as much as we do. It's like saying "It seems like cars are a lot more practical than boats" - but they're intended for different things. There might be some cross over in some of the technology, and how you consume it, and the end game may be AR eyewear/contacts that can do proper virtual reality, but for now - they're quite far apart from each other.
- jayd16 8y ago
  You say that but I'm not sure that's empirically true or just your own personal anecdote. Mainstream sub-$200 VR headsets exists today and people use them daily. AR is fun, but you I can't point to AR actually selling anything. Even Animoji is a special case for apple. They had the face unlock tracking so this kind of face tracking feature makes sense. It's not general purpose AR though. Does Apple have any official app features using AR that isn't face tracking? Apple is hyping AR more because they don't have any VR to speak of but in terms of what's actually released and what people are using I could see an argument that VR comes out ahead in that comparison.
  - AndrewKemendo 8y ago
    I can't point to AR actually selling anything Maybe you personally can't, but that doesn't mean it doesn't. Our company increased a client's purchase rate, A/B tested over 100s of thousands of AR user instances, consistently by 1.89% in a sales cycle. So yes it works. Where implemented well, there is a measurable shift in user behavior. Apple is hyping AR more because they don't have any VR to speak of No. It's because they want to own the AR mapping and content landscape which are both required for glasses to work.
    - jayd16 8y ago
      Youre right I personally can't name it but I'd be interested to know what app has 100s of thousands of AR users browsing products. What app would this be? >No. It's because they want to own the AR mapping and content landscape which are both required for glasses to work. This also makes no sense. They don't own the text or image content creation landscape and they still make computers and browsers. AR already exist (although they're quite expensive and cumbersome) so a new proprietary asset format might be nice but its not a requirement. What are you saying here? Just that they're pushing AR to force adoption of USDZ?
      - AndrewKemendo 8y ago
        To the first question, I'm under NDA for the company we worked for but it's a F50 retailer. Other than them, Ikea, Amazon, Wayfair and a handful of other e-retailers with MM+ users have AR integrated into their apps with comparable bumps. This also makes no sense. It makes perfect sense if you have been an AR developer for 10 years. The simple version is that you need to a 3D "google maps" of sorts, to do something called re-localization before you release glasses. Bootstrapping such a system wouldn't get you very far, literally, because people will be expecting persistent content wherever they go without you - the user - having to insert it. So you have to have a pretty robust mapping corpus to start with. There are a half dozen ways to do this, but the best way is to source and create these maps with mobile/handheld AR systems first. To the content piece, if you can "save" content to the real world - in context - which is what ARKit2 is now doing with their multi-user re-localization/multiplayer, then you can build out the "real estate" system you need for persistent objects - again, something necessary for AR glasses to "just work." For more you can watch my talk on this from a few years ago I did remote for UMASS EE graduate students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_0aoE9nrqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_0aoE9nrqM This is the current land rush in the AR dev world - Apple and Google already own it unfortunately.
tootie 8y ago
The first killer app for AR was probably Word Lens (translating images of words in real time) and that debuted in 2010. Then Pokemon Go 6 years later. I can't think of anything else that has caught on. Seems like a really exciting paradigm, but no one has figured out anything useful to do with it.
- tbassetto 8y ago
  Has World Lens ever caught on though? Honest question, I don’t have any data but I have never used it nor seen anyone else using it.
  - agildehaus 8y ago
    Google bought them a couple years ago and it's now a part of Google Translate.
  - dividuum 8y ago
    Its now built into google translate (at least on my Android, no idea about iOS). It works offline and I've used it occasionally while staying in Hongkong. Was pretty useful.
    - lathiat 8y ago
      I use it a lot when travelling. (In google translate) it’s great.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        Google Translate is a great example of how incremental iterations of AR can still be useful. It's on a phone and not some fancy glasses and the translations aren't really very good but it's still really handy especially if you can't even read the script of the language in question.
  - untog 8y ago
    The problem I've always had is that situations where I'd want to use it are also situations where I have limited cellphone connectivity. Maybe it works offline now, but it didn't last time I checked.
deleted 8y ago
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xoa 8y ago
I think they missed one of the more valuable potential ones that I'd like to see, and it would be yet another extension of something Apple has made a pretty core selling point: privacy and security, specifically enhancing Face ID with a very natural coercion code type system. If a future Face ID 2.0/3.0 system is capable of fast and wide field enough facial and expression/sentiment recognition, then it could be possible to not merely have a binary lock/unlock based on face and attention, but add in expression/sentiment as something else as well, and give it other levels of transparent unlock. So it'd be possible for users to make a full unlock require a specific expression, or alternately (or additionally) have it recognize another expression and trigger other actions. This could at a minimum include disabling Face ID (similarly to pressing a button 5 times) or even triggering an erase, but even better could also leverage Apple's improvements to their granular data encryption system to "unlock like normal" except that apps and content the user had marked as sensitive would not be decrypted and simply not show up on the system in any way at all. Of course this could be done with PIN codes too and I hope that would be an addition, but it'd particularly natural using faces and having the system be able to actively look for signs of distress. Apple is in a real position to do this in an extremely user friendly way and it'd be a huge boon for personal privacy and security. In fact leveraged even farther and using more data points (even just GPS and time of day) I think Apple could make a framework that could go beyond just privacy/security and into helping everyone better handle their usage of mobile devices (which is something else they are clearly at least aware of). Imagine being able to create "views", where underneath granular key release is utilized to allow a user to make any arbitrary set of apps/data be visible or unavailable, and then be able to assign arbitrary trigger conditions for what view the phone shows at any given time. It'd be possible to have a device with personal entertainment, social media, communications and such and also work related material and hobby material and create hard barriers between all them. At work entire or certain times of day entire bits of distraction would simply vanish, totally transparently and without effort, while at home vice versa could happen. While traveling everything but a few key travel apps could go. Users could set it so that financial apps could only be accessed easily at secure geographic locations. All under the control of the owner, and it'd help with self control and information overload, allowing owners to pick the right set of data to take their attention for the right setting. And of course it'd ensure that even if threatened sensitive material could have been made unavailable ahead of time. I'd love that, I think it'd leverage a lot of Apple's strengths and existing frameworks anyway, and that it'd be a real step forward for getting a handle on the ever increasing amount of stuff being thrown at us.
thosakwe 8y ago
What would really take AR to the next level is something like Google glass, where you’re essentially always in AR. The only downside is that you’d have to wear extra glasses, which might not be ideal if you already wear prescription, and that the technology is way too expensive for most people. But overall, I don’t think an AR boom is that far away.
- slantyyz 8y ago
  Well, if sci-fi is the model of where the tech is going, we'll probably be using contact lenses or implants when the tech "crosses the chasm", so to speak.
paul7986 8y ago
AR I think needs killer apps and utilities. The AR measuring app is a good example if it works accurately. Other AR apps/ideas I think would be killer are... - AR historic view: wave phone or point glasses at a location and see how it looked year’s ago via pics & a 3D model or maybe a mix. Make me feel I stepped back in time and have a Disney like feel/experience to it. - AR night time/day time view: At nighttime view in glasses how it looks during the day - AR Linkedin/Facebook: Know the strangers name your talking to and all their public iNet info via glasses view
- monsieurbanana 8y ago
  > AR Linkedin/Facebook: Know the strangers name your talking to and all their public iNet info via glasses view A killer app indeed; it'd kill AR. At least I like to think we aren't so far gone that as a society we can't see how wrong that would be.
  - ReverseCold 8y ago
    > we can't see how wrong that would be I don't think most people will object. Here are some excuses that you can pick from to feel better about our dys... world. "It only works when someone is near me, and I'd have more things to worry about if someone wished harm on me and was sitting next to me." "Well privacy is dead anyway, and I get to play candy crush with friends for free! Personal data is worthless anyway." "Even if they can change who I am given enough personal data, who cares? I'm already shaped by the people around me, what's wrong with adding companies to the mix?" "China is doing it, and China is ahead of us in everything. We must copy them." (These are all more or less from actual discussions I've had about privacy.) Take your pick.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    Not in regular life, but at a conference it would be great.
    - usrusr 8y ago
      But it would ruin all the fun of unknowingly lobbing all your incoherent beginner's ideas at some leading expert of the field that you failed to recognize. Isn't that what conferences are for?
tsenkov 8y ago
Not too many AR apps have succeeded, only because the massively-available AR hardware is not here, yet. The phone with a camera is not it. You can only do that much within that paradigm. The moment (hopefully it's coming) we have (relatively) normal-looking glasses capable to perform like the Magic Leap's headset (haven't tried it - only judging by the publicly available info and investments), that's when handheld devices become obsolete and that's when we will see AR pick-up and win.
- ghaff 8y ago
  You can do a lot with a phone and there's no social stigma associated with walking around with a smartphone. It's an open question for me whether Glassholes 2.0 become a thing even once the tech is there. (Certainly there's a role in niches like doing repairs where information can be overlaid but I'm not convinced it will become a thing when just walking around.)
  - coralreef 8y ago
    Viewing the world through your phone's screen/camera lens is just not a great experience. Having stuff just "appear" is way better. Remains to be seen how this will play out in the short run, but the fantasy is something like smart contact lenses.
ngngngng 8y ago
The only thing I want to be able to do in AR is walk around historical sites like the Colosseum and hold up my phone to see what something looked like millennia ago as I walk around.
mrfusion 8y ago
I’m really excited by this stuff but I can’t think of a useful or interesting project to do with it. Any ideas?
- anonfunction 8y ago
  Translate foreign signs in place, augment plane tickets with realtime flight details, see products in your house before you buy them... just off top of my head.
  - kitsunesoba 8y ago
    I think the concept of “live” paper via AR will be much more popular than most expect. Tickets, like you mentioned, are a great example. Other things could be the ability to flip through different revisions of a printed document or the ability for multiple people to mark up and annotate the same paper document.
kumarvvr 8y ago
It's really interesting Apple has put the overkill face ID sensor in the iPhone. I'm sure future iPad's will have the same too, possibly with even better hardware. I also believe accurate tracking of the eyes of the user will have tremendous impact on the applications that can exploit AR. AR is a tremendously promising field and Apple has gone the easy way, to capture the market and developer mind share. Oculus Rifts' and HoloLens' have failed to adequately capture developer mindshare as on date. Just look at the measure app. It's a tremendously useful app. Though I know it will not have much accuracy, it will satisfy most use cases for normal users. I am excited about the future of AR apps. I can see a lot of potential applications in Engineering, Medical, Civil surveying, etc.
ForrestN 8y ago
I get most excited about VR when I think about the physical ways we currently augment reality with ugly physical objects. If AR becomes truly ubiquitous, I hope that signs and signals can most fade away. Imagine walking through a city without street signs or advertisements or stoplights, or walking through an art museum without any labels on the wall, or an airport without screens and arrows pointing you around. I’m also interested (but also concerned) from a consumer perspective—Amazon etc. will offer Shazaam for literally any object. Like her dress? Buy instantly. That house is tinted green because you qualify for a loan that could purchase it, but the newer one next door is tinted red. Follow the glowing footprints around that corner if you want the slice of cake that person is eating in the park. Most of all, I want to take a walk in the woods and be able to identify any tree, fungus, flower or bird instantly and beautifully. AR will hopefully let us take intelligent guided tours of almost anywhere. Learn about architecture as you walk to work, trace important sites out the window of an airplane onto the ground below, see a bustling Mayan market animated over what is now a set of rectangular fields.
- AckSyn 8y ago
  This is what I hope it becomes as well. You don't see advertisements anywhere unless you have your AR lenses on. It'll identify clothing types, museum images, give you directions for whatever you need, etc. This is the AR of the future and I can't wait to meet it!
- oldcynic 8y ago
  > I hope that signs and signals can most fade away. Imagine walking through a city without street signs or advertisements or stoplights Will that get us a Black Mirror episode where no door or amenity will function until you put the lenses in? LargeCorp was concerned at the potential loss of trade so lobbied for a city bylaw requiring them. Or perhaps the Netflix Anon movie where all buildings are covered with 100' high virtual ads? Don't get me wrong I'd love to get back to a built environment usually only seen in older photos where every surface isn't required to be a marketing opportunity. I just suspect somewhere along the way to this beautiful future there'll be a bait and switch. Cue uBlock for Lens(tm).
  - 8y ago
mrfusion 8y ago
Could the arkit functions be useful for robotics?
nubb 8y ago
Does anyone know of a decent AR headset for someone to hack around with?
- gnl 8y ago
  Project North Star from Leap Motion seems like an affordable DIY solution if you don't mind getting your hands dirty. http://blog.leapmotion.com/north-star-open-source/ http://blog.leapmotion.com/north-star-open-source/
edko 8y ago
What I find disappointing is that Apple is leveling the field against independent developers. Was there really a need for an official measurement app, to destroy the market of the ones that are already on the app store? What's the deal with USDZ? It looks like it will be fundamental for developing AR content for apps on iOS, and they give the market away to Adobe and their paid solution, that is not even finished. Sure, it is an open specification so "anybody can compete", but, if Adobe, with all its resources, gets such a head start, how can indies compete? These two things, to me, are signals that Apple intends only the big players to participate, and, as an independent developer, discourage me from investing on AR development on iOS.
codesternews 8y ago
Surely it look very cool in demos and on screen but It was just hype and will be just hype until there is major breakthrough because of below reason. - It is because you can not use AR everytime and results are not consistent and not work in all environment unlinke touch which can be used everytime perfectly. - Battery and heating problem with AR on phones. - Intreaction is major problem. Intreaction with glasses and all those things is very akward and really not comfortable. I think we have to go long way to have enable the AR.

93 points by awat 8y ago

Seems like AR is a lot more approachable than VR in that you don't have to strap on so much gear to immerse yourself into a Virtual Based / Enhanced reality. Even Snap seems to be invested in AR if you think about it, how many snaps don't feature some augmented visuals? If people go crazy over that to the point that Facebook, and even iOS steals that type of AR functionality, there must be more to AR than meets the eye. To a computer geek it may not seem impressive now, but to the average person it casually sneaks up into their everyday life.

koboll 8y ago
Definitely. I think Apple really envisions something like this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs ...being the future, and they want to get ahead of it.
- zeristor 8y ago
  I think that video is more of a warning about the dangers of cognitive overload, cybersecurity, and estrangement. It looks impressive whilst also being oppressive.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >It looks impressive whilst also being oppressive. That's an apt description of the technological future in general...
ghaff 8y ago
It seems as if VR is one of those things where getting to 90% isn't very useful for most people and even if you get to essentially 100% (wireless, usable with mainstream processing power, comfortable lightweight goggles), it may not be all that interesting outside of some niches like certain types of gaming or virtual worlds. A lot of the time people don't want to be immersed. AR, on the other hand, is very amenable to incremental development. You don't need a Google Glass 2.0 with all the technical and social challenges associated with that. A phone that you can point at something and get information about it is already useful.
- oldcynic 8y ago
  I think VR is forever destined to be a niche sideline. Seems like I've been hearing that VR is about to take off every few years since the 90s. It resolutely fails to do so and aside from some "wow" at tech demos and games there's no killer VR app that makes it a must have. AR is much more instantly obvious to all with things like Night Sky and augmented maps.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    In some ways, you could almost argue that VR (and immersive experiences generally) has garnered less interest as it's become closer to reality. The Kinect is gone. The Wii fad is over. The VR devices that do exist have pretty much highlighted the difficulty of creating fully immersive experiences, especially in a typical home environment. And, as you say, there's really been nothing that makes the typical or even not so typical person go "I gotta get some of that VR." I suppose we may get there someday but it may also be one of those things that it seemed logical to assume people would want (and many thought they did), but they mostly don't.
- jayd16 8y ago
  Seems to me, good AR takes as much or more compute work than good VR. You say "oh it runs on any old phone" but with the exception of a way to strap it to your face, if your phone can do really low latency image tracking then it most likely can do a simple VR scene too. The proof is in the pudding, isn't it? We have way more VR games than AR apps, don't we?
DRW_ 8y ago
They offer fundamentality different experiences so I'm not sure we should be grouping them together as much as we do. It's like saying "It seems like cars are a lot more practical than boats" - but they're intended for different things. There might be some cross over in some of the technology, and how you consume it, and the end game may be AR eyewear/contacts that can do proper virtual reality, but for now - they're quite far apart from each other.
jayd16 8y ago
You say that but I'm not sure that's empirically true or just your own personal anecdote. Mainstream sub-$200 VR headsets exists today and people use them daily. AR is fun, but you I can't point to AR actually selling anything. Even Animoji is a special case for apple. They had the face unlock tracking so this kind of face tracking feature makes sense. It's not general purpose AR though. Does Apple have any official app features using AR that isn't face tracking? Apple is hyping AR more because they don't have any VR to speak of but in terms of what's actually released and what people are using I could see an argument that VR comes out ahead in that comparison.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  I can't point to AR actually selling anything Maybe you personally can't, but that doesn't mean it doesn't. Our company increased a client's purchase rate, A/B tested over 100s of thousands of AR user instances, consistently by 1.89% in a sales cycle. So yes it works. Where implemented well, there is a measurable shift in user behavior. Apple is hyping AR more because they don't have any VR to speak of No. It's because they want to own the AR mapping and content landscape which are both required for glasses to work.
  - jayd16 8y ago
    Youre right I personally can't name it but I'd be interested to know what app has 100s of thousands of AR users browsing products. What app would this be? >No. It's because they want to own the AR mapping and content landscape which are both required for glasses to work. This also makes no sense. They don't own the text or image content creation landscape and they still make computers and browsers. AR already exist (although they're quite expensive and cumbersome) so a new proprietary asset format might be nice but its not a requirement. What are you saying here? Just that they're pushing AR to force adoption of USDZ?
    - AndrewKemendo 8y ago
      To the first question, I'm under NDA for the company we worked for but it's a F50 retailer. Other than them, Ikea, Amazon, Wayfair and a handful of other e-retailers with MM+ users have AR integrated into their apps with comparable bumps. This also makes no sense. It makes perfect sense if you have been an AR developer for 10 years. The simple version is that you need to a 3D "google maps" of sorts, to do something called re-localization before you release glasses. Bootstrapping such a system wouldn't get you very far, literally, because people will be expecting persistent content wherever they go without you - the user - having to insert it. So you have to have a pretty robust mapping corpus to start with. There are a half dozen ways to do this, but the best way is to source and create these maps with mobile/handheld AR systems first. To the content piece, if you can "save" content to the real world - in context - which is what ARKit2 is now doing with their multi-user re-localization/multiplayer, then you can build out the "real estate" system you need for persistent objects - again, something necessary for AR glasses to "just work." For more you can watch my talk on this from a few years ago I did remote for UMASS EE graduate students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_0aoE9nrqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_0aoE9nrqM This is the current land rush in the AR dev world - Apple and Google already own it unfortunately.

tootie 8y ago

The first killer app for AR was probably Word Lens (translating images of words in real time) and that debuted in 2010. Then Pokemon Go 6 years later. I can't think of anything else that has caught on. Seems like a really exciting paradigm, but no one has figured out anything useful to do with it.

tbassetto 8y ago
Has World Lens ever caught on though? Honest question, I don’t have any data but I have never used it nor seen anyone else using it.
- agildehaus 8y ago
  Google bought them a couple years ago and it's now a part of Google Translate.
- dividuum 8y ago
  Its now built into google translate (at least on my Android, no idea about iOS). It works offline and I've used it occasionally while staying in Hongkong. Was pretty useful.
  - lathiat 8y ago
    I use it a lot when travelling. (In google translate) it’s great.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      Google Translate is a great example of how incremental iterations of AR can still be useful. It's on a phone and not some fancy glasses and the translations aren't really very good but it's still really handy especially if you can't even read the script of the language in question.
- untog 8y ago
  The problem I've always had is that situations where I'd want to use it are also situations where I have limited cellphone connectivity. Maybe it works offline now, but it didn't last time I checked.

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xoa 8y ago

I think they missed one of the more valuable potential ones that I'd like to see, and it would be yet another extension of something Apple has made a pretty core selling point: privacy and security, specifically enhancing Face ID with a very natural coercion code type system. If a future Face ID 2.0/3.0 system is capable of fast and wide field enough facial and expression/sentiment recognition, then it could be possible to not merely have a binary lock/unlock based on face and attention, but add in expression/sentiment as something else as well, and give it other levels of transparent unlock. So it'd be possible for users to make a full unlock require a specific expression, or alternately (or additionally) have it recognize another expression and trigger other actions. This could at a minimum include disabling Face ID (similarly to pressing a button 5 times) or even triggering an erase, but even better could also leverage Apple's improvements to their granular data encryption system to "unlock like normal" except that apps and content the user had marked as sensitive would not be decrypted and simply not show up on the system in any way at all. Of course this could be done with PIN codes too and I hope that would be an addition, but it'd particularly natural using faces and having the system be able to actively look for signs of distress. Apple is in a real position to do this in an extremely user friendly way and it'd be a huge boon for personal privacy and security. In fact leveraged even farther and using more data points (even just GPS and time of day) I think Apple could make a framework that could go beyond just privacy/security and into helping everyone better handle their usage of mobile devices (which is something else they are clearly at least aware of). Imagine being able to create "views", where underneath granular key release is utilized to allow a user to make any arbitrary set of apps/data be visible or unavailable, and then be able to assign arbitrary trigger conditions for what view the phone shows at any given time. It'd be possible to have a device with personal entertainment, social media, communications and such and also work related material and hobby material and create hard barriers between all them. At work entire or certain times of day entire bits of distraction would simply vanish, totally transparently and without effort, while at home vice versa could happen. While traveling everything but a few key travel apps could go. Users could set it so that financial apps could only be accessed easily at secure geographic locations. All under the control of the owner, and it'd help with self control and information overload, allowing owners to pick the right set of data to take their attention for the right setting. And of course it'd ensure that even if threatened sensitive material could have been made unavailable ahead of time. I'd love that, I think it'd leverage a lot of Apple's strengths and existing frameworks anyway, and that it'd be a real step forward for getting a handle on the ever increasing amount of stuff being thrown at us.

thosakwe 8y ago

What would really take AR to the next level is something like Google glass, where you’re essentially always in AR. The only downside is that you’d have to wear extra glasses, which might not be ideal if you already wear prescription, and that the technology is way too expensive for most people. But overall, I don’t think an AR boom is that far away.

slantyyz 8y ago
Well, if sci-fi is the model of where the tech is going, we'll probably be using contact lenses or implants when the tech "crosses the chasm", so to speak.

paul7986 8y ago

AR I think needs killer apps and utilities. The AR measuring app is a good example if it works accurately. Other AR apps/ideas I think would be killer are... - AR historic view: wave phone or point glasses at a location and see how it looked year’s ago via pics & a 3D model or maybe a mix. Make me feel I stepped back in time and have a Disney like feel/experience to it. - AR night time/day time view: At nighttime view in glasses how it looks during the day - AR Linkedin/Facebook: Know the strangers name your talking to and all their public iNet info via glasses view

monsieurbanana 8y ago
> AR Linkedin/Facebook: Know the strangers name your talking to and all their public iNet info via glasses view A killer app indeed; it'd kill AR. At least I like to think we aren't so far gone that as a society we can't see how wrong that would be.
- ReverseCold 8y ago
  > we can't see how wrong that would be I don't think most people will object. Here are some excuses that you can pick from to feel better about our dys... world. "It only works when someone is near me, and I'd have more things to worry about if someone wished harm on me and was sitting next to me." "Well privacy is dead anyway, and I get to play candy crush with friends for free! Personal data is worthless anyway." "Even if they can change who I am given enough personal data, who cares? I'm already shaped by the people around me, what's wrong with adding companies to the mix?" "China is doing it, and China is ahead of us in everything. We must copy them." (These are all more or less from actual discussions I've had about privacy.) Take your pick.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  Not in regular life, but at a conference it would be great.
  - usrusr 8y ago
    But it would ruin all the fun of unknowingly lobbing all your incoherent beginner's ideas at some leading expert of the field that you failed to recognize. Isn't that what conferences are for?

tsenkov 8y ago

Not too many AR apps have succeeded, only because the massively-available AR hardware is not here, yet. The phone with a camera is not it. You can only do that much within that paradigm. The moment (hopefully it's coming) we have (relatively) normal-looking glasses capable to perform like the Magic Leap's headset (haven't tried it - only judging by the publicly available info and investments), that's when handheld devices become obsolete and that's when we will see AR pick-up and win.

ghaff 8y ago
You can do a lot with a phone and there's no social stigma associated with walking around with a smartphone. It's an open question for me whether Glassholes 2.0 become a thing even once the tech is there. (Certainly there's a role in niches like doing repairs where information can be overlaid but I'm not convinced it will become a thing when just walking around.)
- coralreef 8y ago
  Viewing the world through your phone's screen/camera lens is just not a great experience. Having stuff just "appear" is way better. Remains to be seen how this will play out in the short run, but the fantasy is something like smart contact lenses.

ngngngng 8y ago

The only thing I want to be able to do in AR is walk around historical sites like the Colosseum and hold up my phone to see what something looked like millennia ago as I walk around.

mrfusion 8y ago

I’m really excited by this stuff but I can’t think of a useful or interesting project to do with it. Any ideas?

anonfunction 8y ago
Translate foreign signs in place, augment plane tickets with realtime flight details, see products in your house before you buy them... just off top of my head.
- kitsunesoba 8y ago
  I think the concept of “live” paper via AR will be much more popular than most expect. Tickets, like you mentioned, are a great example. Other things could be the ability to flip through different revisions of a printed document or the ability for multiple people to mark up and annotate the same paper document.

kumarvvr 8y ago

It's really interesting Apple has put the overkill face ID sensor in the iPhone. I'm sure future iPad's will have the same too, possibly with even better hardware. I also believe accurate tracking of the eyes of the user will have tremendous impact on the applications that can exploit AR. AR is a tremendously promising field and Apple has gone the easy way, to capture the market and developer mind share. Oculus Rifts' and HoloLens' have failed to adequately capture developer mindshare as on date. Just look at the measure app. It's a tremendously useful app. Though I know it will not have much accuracy, it will satisfy most use cases for normal users. I am excited about the future of AR apps. I can see a lot of potential applications in Engineering, Medical, Civil surveying, etc.

ForrestN 8y ago

I get most excited about VR when I think about the physical ways we currently augment reality with ugly physical objects. If AR becomes truly ubiquitous, I hope that signs and signals can most fade away. Imagine walking through a city without street signs or advertisements or stoplights, or walking through an art museum without any labels on the wall, or an airport without screens and arrows pointing you around. I’m also interested (but also concerned) from a consumer perspective—Amazon etc. will offer Shazaam for literally any object. Like her dress? Buy instantly. That house is tinted green because you qualify for a loan that could purchase it, but the newer one next door is tinted red. Follow the glowing footprints around that corner if you want the slice of cake that person is eating in the park. Most of all, I want to take a walk in the woods and be able to identify any tree, fungus, flower or bird instantly and beautifully. AR will hopefully let us take intelligent guided tours of almost anywhere. Learn about architecture as you walk to work, trace important sites out the window of an airplane onto the ground below, see a bustling Mayan market animated over what is now a set of rectangular fields.

AckSyn 8y ago
This is what I hope it becomes as well. You don't see advertisements anywhere unless you have your AR lenses on. It'll identify clothing types, museum images, give you directions for whatever you need, etc. This is the AR of the future and I can't wait to meet it!
oldcynic 8y ago
> I hope that signs and signals can most fade away. Imagine walking through a city without street signs or advertisements or stoplights Will that get us a Black Mirror episode where no door or amenity will function until you put the lenses in? LargeCorp was concerned at the potential loss of trade so lobbied for a city bylaw requiring them. Or perhaps the Netflix Anon movie where all buildings are covered with 100' high virtual ads? Don't get me wrong I'd love to get back to a built environment usually only seen in older photos where every surface isn't required to be a marketing opportunity. I just suspect somewhere along the way to this beautiful future there'll be a bait and switch. Cue uBlock for Lens(tm).
- 8y ago

mrfusion 8y ago

Could the arkit functions be useful for robotics?

nubb 8y ago

Does anyone know of a decent AR headset for someone to hack around with?

gnl 8y ago
Project North Star from Leap Motion seems like an affordable DIY solution if you don't mind getting your hands dirty. http://blog.leapmotion.com/north-star-open-source/ http://blog.leapmotion.com/north-star-open-source/

edko 8y ago

What I find disappointing is that Apple is leveling the field against independent developers. Was there really a need for an official measurement app, to destroy the market of the ones that are already on the app store? What's the deal with USDZ? It looks like it will be fundamental for developing AR content for apps on iOS, and they give the market away to Adobe and their paid solution, that is not even finished. Sure, it is an open specification so "anybody can compete", but, if Adobe, with all its resources, gets such a head start, how can indies compete? These two things, to me, are signals that Apple intends only the big players to participate, and, as an independent developer, discourage me from investing on AR development on iOS.

codesternews 8y ago

Surely it look very cool in demos and on screen but It was just hype and will be just hype until there is major breakthrough because of below reason. - It is because you can not use AR everytime and results are not consistent and not work in all environment unlinke touch which can be used everytime perfectly. - Battery and heating problem with AR on phones. - Intreaction is major problem. Intreaction with glasses and all those things is very akward and really not comfortable. I think we have to go long way to have enable the AR.