
Developers Are Already Making Great AR Experiences Using Apple's ARKit - cpt_snowcrash
https://net.xyz/2017/07/10/developers-are-already-making-great-ar-experiences-using-apples-arkit/
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thisacctforreal
There's no way you can talk about ARKit without showing off the measuring tape
apps

[https://youtu.be/z7DYC_zbZCM](https://youtu.be/z7DYC_zbZCM)

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philbarr
Wow - how does it do that?! Image recognition techniques alone (as far as I
know) couldn't do that, right? So how does it know how far away something is?

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rsp1984
My guess is they estimate one or several dominant scene planes from the sparse
triangulated feature points and get scale through incorporating accelerometer
measurements.

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cageface
I've seen several very creative demos but I'm still struggling to see
practical applications. It seems like massive, every day adoption of this kind
of AR is going to have to wait for dedicated glasses.

Maybe I just lack imagination.

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forgottenacc57
Maybe point it at a sports game for stats and game data?

Point it down the street to have great restaurants highlighted?

Point it at the sky to get astronomical facts?

Point it at tourist landmarks to find out about them?

Point it anywhere to see where athletes/runners/cyclists have run and in what
time?

Visualise all historical car accidents at a given location?

Visualise all hidden infrastructure, underground gas lines etc?

See history overlaid on the present?

Visualise public transport routes?

Show "upcoming events at this venue" as you pass theatres, cinemas, stadiums?

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gcb0
> Point it down the street to have great restaurants highlighted?

on android early on (before 2.3!) yelp called it lens, and had a monocle icon.
google maps and nokia apps also had it at some point I think. and no better
implementation will ever make it less useless.

it was a uter useles gimmick. everyone tried it exactly once.

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calvin_c
It was on one of the early versions of the Yelp iOS app as well. Don't really
remember if it was there on day one, but I remember playing around with it in
iOS 2 or 3.

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falsedan
It was called Monocle, and it's still there, under More (on the version of the
app I have installed).

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King-Aaron
Some of these are genuinely brilliant - I love the video of "testing" a
cushion on your own couch before you buy.

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amitaggarwal
Yes , the biggest problem for me and wife has been to visualize how the new
furniture we are buying will look inside our house. AR can solve lot of those
problems to some extent

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King-Aaron
I can see benefits in the interior paint industry, and the flooring industries
too. Being able to 'preview' tens of thousands of dollars worth of tiles (for
instance) would be a real benefit, especially if you operated an interior
design company etc.

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skc
Very cool tech but the phone as viewport seems like a fairly large step
backwards in my opinion.

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kenbellows
Depends on the use application. For observing especially large objects[1][2],
I agree, it would be very hard to use for anything beyond a quick demo. But on
the other hand, I think the phone is a perfect viewport for on-the-fly smaller
applications, like an AR measuring tape[3], adding info about artwork in a
museum, displaying a virtual prototype of a dish on a restaurant's menu[4],
translating street signs on the fly[5], etc. The phone is perfect for
applications where you don't want to plan ahead or be constantly carrying an
extra piece of equipment around.

1:
[https://twitter.com/madewithARKit/status/880815805281300480](https://twitter.com/madewithARKit/status/880815805281300480)
2:
[https://twitter.com/madewithARKit/status/880056901987254272](https://twitter.com/madewithARKit/status/880056901987254272)
3:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7DYC_zbZCM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7DYC_zbZCM)
4:
[https://twitter.com/madewithARKit/status/880744158423658497](https://twitter.com/madewithARKit/status/880744158423658497)
5: [http://newatlas.com/google-translate-
update/35605/](http://newatlas.com/google-translate-update/35605/)

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mycat
Seems Apple solved monocular SLAM problem before attempting VR.

Wonder if they used FPGA or anything to speed up the algorithm? In my
experience SLAM takes too much computation power and/or release too much heat.

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wmeredith
SLAM?

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thedevil
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping)

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ruairidhwm
This is awesome! I can't wait to start playing around with this :)

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clayjen
Took me a while to realize that two guys playing basketball were actually
Virtual

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darpanat
Has anyone played with the ARKit yet to develop? Will be great if you can
share your experience. I have made couple of games on Unity and want to dive
into mixed reality applications.

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greggman
Looks like someone has already made a Unity ARKIT plugin

[https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/92515](https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/92515)

