Apple has made some surprise announcements today regarding virtual reality (VR), revealing Steam VR, Metal, Unity and Unreal Engine support will be coming to Mac’s. But the company wasn’t finished there, moving on to augmented reality (AR), Apple has come up with ARKit for developers.
Showcasing the software in real-time on stage, Apple’s Craig Federighi showed that the app could recognise a table and was then able to add digital objects that perfectly sat at the right level. He then added a lamp to highlight the dynamic lighting that’s possible.
Looking very similar to Google’s Tango technology, ARKit includes features such as stable motion-tracking, ambient lighting estimation, scale estimation, plane estimation with basic boundaries and support for Unity, Unreal Engine, and Scene Kit.
And because of Apple’s ecosystem of iOS devices and their GPU’s, CPU’s, camera’s and motion sensors this means Apple has ‘hundreds of millions of of iPhones and iPads’ that will support ARKit, which the company claims will make the software ‘the largest AR platform in the world’.
Federighi then continued the demonstration with a LEGO model that could be exploded, and the ever popular Pokemon GO which looked even better with Pikachu looking as if it was actually sat on the ground.
ARKit will support the upcoming version of Apples operating system, iOS 11 which was also announced during the conference.
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