At last week’s Worldwide Developer Conference we finally got to see what Apple has up its sleeve when it comes to Augmented Reality. This is huge for the AR space as this basically lets developers create AR tools for any app, not just a walled garden like Facebook which we heard from in this regard recently.
This breakdown from Benedict Evans explains it better than I can:
“As was entirely predictable, Apple has added APIs for augmented reality. The phone uses the camera and motion sensors to do rock-solid positional reaching – you can tap on your screen to place a game on a table in front of you, walk around it, wave the phone around and all the action stays locked in place. This is hard for anyone without Apple’s integrated model to match. Facebook announced its own AR APIs in the spring, but they don’t have the hardware integration (nor a history of being a reliable development partner), and this is something that naturally belongs in the operating system. AR is the hot thing now, and the demos are cool, but this is also, of course, a natural building block for the mixed reality glasses that Apple is widely rumored to be working on for sale in a couple of years (equally, the Apple Watch and AirPods are probably hardware building blocks for this). When it comes, the first apps will already be there.”
Check out Venture Beat’s demo below:
