Category: apple arkit

Posted on

Video Gives Us a Peek Into the Future of How AR and VR Will Work Together

We’re all waiting for the day when you can put on a singular, tether-free headset and experience all the ‘R’s that VR/AR/MR have to offer—and NormalVR, a “small but focused” group of passionate immersive media creators just gave us a peek into what’s possible when you mash it all together.

Known recently for their whimsical open source keyboard (and magnificently weird blobby-guy), Normal is a group of remotely-located developers that are using their own technology to make developing from separate locations an easier experience. By their own admission, they aren’t entirely sure what they’re doing, but it’s clear from the video that surfaced yesterday that they’re hitting on some very big ideas and executing them with serious flair.

In a recent tweet, the group shows what at first appears to be another fun video demonstrating the potential of creating apps with Apple’s recently released ARkit. But this is more than just a dancing hotdog-guy. Zooming out, we see the blobby-guy avatar is in fact controlled by a person using an HTC Vive standing just out of frame, creating a digital sunflower with some species of art program like Tilt Brush (2016).

Why is this so important? Normal is building this on readily available, cost-effective hardware and it seems to work perfectly.

As a launchpad for universal Windows apps that are designed to work across HoloLens and the company’s wallet-friendly fleet of VR headsets, Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality Platform is taking the first baby steps into making sure there’s a strong base of apps in the AR/VR shared ecosystem. More important to the scope of the article, Microsoft also spearheaded a neat way to turn your DSLR into an AR capture device so you can see what goes on in the digital realm, but this requires you to buy an extra HoloLens, which at $3000 is a pretty steep price to pay.

By picking up an iPhone and a VR headset like the Oculus Rift, which now costs even lower than ever at $400, developers can start building the future of games and apps for all immersive platforms—hopefully coming sooner rather than later.

The post Video Gives Us a Peek Into the Future of How AR and VR Will Work Together appeared first on Road to VR.

Posted on

4 Dev Demos Showing Off Apple’s New ARKit Tracking

Showcased at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this week, ARKit is a new core technology for iOS 11, due to launch this Fall, soon to enable augmented reality features on hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads. As the iOS 11 developer beta is already available, we’re starting to see some interesting real-world tests of ARKit, showing off the tracking that’s achievable with nothing more than a camera.

Developer Cody Brown hacked together a quick demo using Overwatch assets as a ‘hello world’ test of ARKit running on an iPhone 6S:

Apple’s keynote included a couple of impressive live demonstrations of screen-based AR on the stage, including a sneak peek at an Unreal-powered experience from developer Wingnut AR:

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of that demo was that it was running on an iPad, using the single camera on the back of the device for tracking. This appeared to deliver fairly stable tracking, without the need for dedicated hardware, unlike Google Tango, which uses a suite of cameras and sensors.

Now that developers have their hands on ARKit, the early real-world tests are very promising, such as this clip of the Unity sample demo showing tracking points and plane estimation:

This video from Austrian augmented reality company ViewAR puts the technology through a demanding tracking test, covering the camera, moving quickly away from the virtual object, through multiple rooms with different lighting conditions to check for drift. The result is remarkable considering the limitations of using a single camera:

Apple is believed to be hard at work on AR technologies, and is likely to make screen-based AR a key selling point of the next iPhone, which is anticipated to have a near bezel-free design, which would certainly enhance the appearance of AR features.

The post 4 Dev Demos Showing Off Apple’s New ARKit Tracking appeared first on Road to VR.

Posted on

Apple’s ARKit is Bringing Augmented Reality to “hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads”

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is here, and today’s keynote saw a number of VR-specific announcements including Apple’s first VR-ready computers to go along with the launch of the company’s newest macOS High Sierra. While the company is finally going ‘VR-native’ for desktop, Apple is also zeroing in on augmented reality for iOS 11 with the entrance of their newly revealed app developer kit ‘ARKit’.

Possibly taking a swipe at Facebook’s latest AR demo at F8 in April, Senior VP of software engineering Craig Federighi said: “We’ve all seen a lot of carefully edited vision videos on this topic recently, but in the case, I’d like to show you something for real.”

Starting up a test application that will be made available to developers, Federighi explains that with the iPhone’s computer visions capabilities it’s able to map surfaces and add digital objects—replete with interactive animations and dynamic lighting. Adding a steaming coffee cup, a lamp and a vase to a bare, marker-less table, the tracking proves to be relatively solid.

Federighi says that ARKit provides fast and stable motion-tracking, plane estimation with basic boundaries, ambient lighting estimation, scale estimation, support for Unity, Unreal, SceneKit and Xcode app templates—all available on “hundred of millions of iPhones and iPads […] making overnight ARKit the largest AR platform in the world.”

Apple says iOS 11 will be made available to iPhone 5s and later, all iPad Air and iPad Pro models, iPad 5th generation, iPad mini 2 and later, and iPod touch 6th generation. iOS 11 will be released this fall, likely in tandem with iPhone 8 and iPhone 7S smartphones. A public beta is coming in June.

image courtesy Apple

Apple is working with third-parties such as IKEA, Lego, and Niantic to use ARKit, with Apple showing an improved Pokémon Go on stage that looks to actually utilize augmented reality to bring the game to life. Because ARKit uses computer vision that relies on the device’s onboard sensors and CPU/GPU, no external equipment is required to run these sorts of AR experiences.

The keynote also revealed a new AR-focused company from critically-acclaimed director and FX guru Peter Jackson called ‘Wingnut AR’. A special demo showed off the graphical and camera-based tracking capabilities of Apple’s hardware featuring a complex, real-time rendered scene digitally placed on a tabletop using an iPad. Wingnut AR is bringing an AR experience to the App Store later this year. Check out the video below to see Wingnut AR’s special Apple demo.

 

The post Apple’s ARKit is Bringing Augmented Reality to “hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads” appeared first on Road to VR.