Why I Love ARKit for Apple iOS 11
Apple’s iOS 11 release brings ARKit, a new SDK that unlocks devices’ potential to transform reality. Learn what it is, how to use it and why you’ll love it. By Bill Morefield.
Education
Augmented reality has a lot of potential to revolutionize education at many levels. Apps that take an abstract or large scale concept and place it in front of someone’s eyes can be a powerful tool to help students understand new topics and concepts. As an example, ARSolarPlay shrinks the solar system to fit in the room with you. It’s one thing for a student to hear about the solar system. It’s another for a student to see it before them in the classroom and move around between the planets.
Beyond the classroom, historical locations and places can now augment their experience with AR apps. Instead of giving visitors a simple pamphlet at a historic site, each visitor’s phone could become their key to understanding the past. Points of interest could now provide relevant visual and auditory information when you visit a particular important location.
Today, you can merely read about a battle that took place in a field in front of you. With an augmented reality app, visitors could listen to narration while watching a virtual re-enactment of the battle. Or maybe you could watch a virtual recreation of a volcano eruption as you stand on the edge of the crater!
Mapping and Location
Current navigational apps simply tell you to turn left at the next intersection. An augmented reality app could draw the path for you, showing the turn around the corner. A hiking application can show you the fork to take for the desired trail, or lead you back to the trail when lost. For an example, check out the ARKit-CoreLocation library, which demonstrates combining augmented reality with the GPS data.
A businesses could help customers better navigate their stores with an app. Hospitals and universities in particular often have decades worth of remodels and additions that make finding certain rooms or floors rather difficult. Imagine an app that would lay out the path to a doctor’s office or waiting room or area right on your phone screen.
If you’ve ever become separated from friends at a concert, festival, or other event spread over a large and crowded space, imagine how useful a version of Find My Friends could be that shows you where your group is, and what path to take to get back to them.
Some Weakness of ARKit for iOS 11
As excited as I am about the potential of augmented reality on iOS, there are still a number of hurdles to realizing some of the full benefits of augmented reality in every area of your life.
The biggest hurdle I’ve run into with ARKit is its inability to detect vertical planes. ARKit can place your virtual object onto a table, but not hang it on the wall. It also doesn’t handle complex surfaces very well, such as such as curved walls or other non-flat surfaces.
The computer vision analysis that provides much of the “magic” of ARKit needs quite clear images to do its job. A dim room with few details may not work well in AR, so that haunted house app idea you had for Hallowe’en might just have to wait for later updates to ARKit.
I’ve also found that surfaces without texture or much contrast take longer to track, and once recognized, don’t track as well as textured surfaces with high contrast. This includes bare white walls, along with plain or simply-textured floors. These surfaces need users to move the camera around more to give the library enough data to process. The library though, does provide feedback in these cases that you can return to the user.
There are also concerns about how augmented reality apps will affect the battery life. An augmented reality app will be using the camera, displaying complex graphics on the screen, and performing complex calculations — all simultaneously, which can be a drain on the battery. Augmented reality should take a lesson learned from early GPS apps: a reputation for hurting battery lie can hurt adoption of a fantastic technology.
Since many users skirmish with their battery life daily (raises hand), power consumption is a barrier to broad adoption. Fortunately, power banks and portable chargers are cheap.
Where to go from here?
Augmented reality isn’t a new technology, but ARKit simplifies it enough that you can look forward to an exciting new wave of apps in the months to come.
Virtual reality has been “the next big thing” in technology for decades, but hasn’t fully arrived for a variety of reasons. Augmented reality feels… different. Naturally, not all apps will be winners. But there will also be amazing ones. Life-changing ones, even. The arrival of real apps using ARKit to solve real-world problems (let’s face it — it’s all about real-world entertainment, ) is just beginning.
If you’re excited to get started, Apple’s documentation provides a good reference and overview of the library. And as usual, we have some great tutorials and products to get you started:
- The book iOS 11 by Tutorials , available on our online store, contains a chapter introducing ARKit and shows you how to create an interior design app in augmented reality.
- 2D Games by Tutorials, also available on our store, has a ton of great projects in SceneKit and includes a bonus chapter on creating a game in ARKit.
- We also have several screencasts screencasts on ARKit for our video subscribers.
I’m excited to see what new places you take augmented reality in the years to come! Have a favorite AR app, or an idea you want to share? Come join the discussion below!