
Show HN: ARCharts – Augmented Reality Charts for iOS - BorisEm
https://github.com/Boris-Em/ARCharts
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yodon
Graph libraries for VR (where the system has total knowledge of the scene
contents) and for more powerful AR devices are definitely needed in tons of
industries.

That said, as someone who spends nearly every waking hour coding for VR and
AR, I find it hard to believe ARKit graphing applications are anything but
throwaway gimmicks because the ARKit's lack of semantic knowledge about the
local environment means there is no way for it to attach the graphs to
contextually meaningful world points without significant user input.

Without contextual placement, ARKit graphs are just a way to force the user to
expend metabolic energy moving their phone around to view things that can and
have been presented as well or better on a traditional displays for decades.
Sure, it's cool the first time you see one, but ARKit is not how you're going
to want to view your SEO conversion data, regardless of how fun it was the
first time you imagined it.

I recommend moving this library into Unity and starting to establish it as the
way to do graphs on systems that can have semantic knowledge about the
environment.

~~~
redindian
Are you saying arkit cannot identify a car if I want to chart it's mileage
over it?

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yodon
Correct. ARKit can keep the chart fixed above the car if you put it there, but
it can't yet identify it as a car nor can it distinguish your car from your
partner's car, and if you close the app and leave the lot and come back,
you're going to need to place the chart over your car again in almost any
realistic scenario. The best you get at present is "here is the floor" and
"there is a wall", neither of which help the app provide contextual relevance
for you. This doesn't make for terribly compelling charting applications
beyond the first 15 seconds of "that's so cool it totally works" (which is a
pretty cool 15 seconds).

The HoloLens will likely be able to keep the chart over your car if you leave
your garage and come back, but not if you move your car and probably not if
you park your car outside in the sun (which swamps the spatial projectors and
prevents proper environment scanning), and you still need to have manually
placed it over your car in the first place.

~~~
lwansbrough
I would suspect CoreML would play an important role in scene identification,
which could certainly be used in conjunction with ARKit, don't you think?

Microsoft is investing a lot in computer vision, I'll be interested to see
what changes they make to the next HoloLens' vision capabilities. Plane
finding seems almost as good in ARKit as it was on HoloLens when I was
developing on it (albeit the environmental understanding is limited/non-
existent in ARKit, which as you mentioned is a big part of the equation.)

~~~
yodon
Fortunately plane finding is pretty easy even with something as simple as
RANSAC[0]. I'm sure there are better algorithms now but ransac has been around
forever and is nearly trivial to implement. It just doesn't easily generalize
to "Siri, find my car"

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_sample_consensus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_sample_consensus)

~~~
alaskamiller
Have an email? Would like to connect regarding ARKit

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Sujan
And finally 3D x-y-z bar charts make at least a little bit of sense when you
can walk around them.

~~~
pmontra
Definitely yes, but you have to look at them through your phone so I'm afraid
it gets tiresome quickly. It's fish for the graph + raise phone + align and
walk around the graph vs seat and flip the charts around by swiping the
screen. I agree with the current top poster, it's a gimmick.

It reminds me of the narrow visual field of the hololens I tried months ago. I
spent half of the time turning around and moving my head up and down to look
for objects. Then they were pleasantly steady once I found them but the
experience doesn't compare with the visual field we're born with.

Those ARKit charts look very steady too. I assume that fixing a virtual object
in space is a solved problem and it's not an easy one.

~~~
Sujan
I hope we will get there... This in lightweight glasses with great field of
view.

