So it’s been a while since ARKit came out, and the App Store was briefly flooded with novelty apps, and we went off giving speeches on it and all, and that was all very exciting wasn’t it? Until the excitement of watching floating sharks and all died down, and interest is at a pretty low level these days. Incorrectly, we think, you should be keeping an eye on it, as Apple’s ongoing investment in is just too big to be purely a side hobby — as was perceptively noted here by Mr. Dent Reality:
Apple Restarted Their AR Platform Strategy, and Nobody Noticed
It’s a significant move for Apple to leave behind a two-year old platform, and replace it with something completely new. They’ve obviously made that decision with a long-term view — SceneKit had some downsides, and they thought a new framework would give them a better foundation for the future.
With that in mind, it’s interesting to think about what RealityKit brings — an AR-only framework, with high-performance, and a modern Swift-only API that regular developers can use. I don’t like to speculate too much, but I’d imagine that this is Apple’s path towards wearable AR. And features that we’re seeing emphasised today, such as anchored content, shared experiences and Quick Look — all now supported through RealityKit — could be a primary part of a future wearable product…
Well, he’s certainly doing his part … and much more than his part, check out
How to Build Really Compelling AR Experiences
Complete with open source MuseumAR – “A museum AR experience and simulator.”
(Museum apps are a commonly mooted use case — also check out Building a Museum App with ARKit 2!)
The most comprehensive overview of the new stuff we’ve seen is this series, annotating the RealityKit-CardFlip example game:
- Part 0: A high level intro to the latest AR framework
- Part 1: The new SCNNode
- Part 2: AR gestures made easy
- Part 3: Natively helping your users anchor themselves with an ARCoachingOverlayView
- Part 4: subscribing to RealityKit Events
- Part 5: Stay sat down when creating your AR apps
- Part 6: Creating Collaborative experiences and Multiplayer games with RealityKit
Also rather interesting is the effort Apple’s going to to make this technology user accessible. Remember last year,
How USDZ Enables New Experiences for ARKit
Creating an Animoji-Style 3D Character to Use With TrueDepth
All very interesting, but a lot of work … until now:
The new Reality Converter app makes it easy to convert, view, and customize USDZ 3D objects on Mac. Simply drag-and-drop common 3D file formats, such as .obj, .gltf and .usd, to view the converted USDZ result, customize material properties with your own textures, and edit file metadata…
Which makes it even easier to create experiences like discussed here:
How to make an augmented reality decorating experience app with AR Quick Look
Here’s some more interesting articles on using CoreML and Vision to make your AR apps cleverer:
Enhancing ARKit Image Detection with CoreML
Face Detection and Recognition With CoreML and ARKit
How to Detect and Track the User’s Face Using ARKit
And although it could use some up to dating, check out Awesome-ARKit as well!
