A clutch of forthcoming ARKit releases will hit the app store following the launch of iOS 11.
While we’ve already seen augmented reality hits on smartphones, most notably in the form of the mighty Pokémon Go, ARKit provides developers with a powerful set of tools to realistically embed and scale virtual 3D imagery onto the real world.
IKEA Place
While tramping kilometers around your nearest IKEA store might be a fun weekend activity for some, it can be hard to visualize how that sweet faux leather sofa or colorful end table will fit into your home.
To that end, the new IKEA Place app will let you select items from the company’s vast product catalogue and drag them into your own home. IKEA’s Michael Valdsgaard told TechCrunch that the app’s going to be iOS-only for the moment due to the size of the Apple’s AR platform, but with the launch of Google’s ARCore for Android, it remains to be seen how long Apple can hold on to its exclusive.
Walking Dead: Our World
If you’ve ever felt that there’s not enough zombie-killing action in your day-to-day life, Finnish developer Next Games has your back with The Walking Dead: Our World.
The game combines the zombie hordes of the wildly popular TV show with Pokémon Go style augmented reality gaming. Unlike Niantic’s faithful implementation of the monster-catching sim, which can see some users tramping kilometres to track down a single measly Pidgey, Our World promises that you’ll be able to ‘fight walkers on the streets, in the park, on your sofa, wherever and whenever you feel like it’, with weapons ranging from swords to fully-automatic firearms.
My Very Hungry Caterpillar AR
In the time-honored tradition of keeping small children busy with colorful and vaguely educational distractions, kids’ favorite The Very Hungry Caterpillar is getting a fully fledged AR implementation.
My Very Hungry Caterpillar AR by Touch Press, the company behind the award winning iOS, Android and Windows apps based on the book, will see you nurturing your very own adorable caterpillar, playing with it and helping it grow a garden.
The AR incarnation appears to do a lovely job of merging the caterpillar’s world with our own, following the phone’s motion to provide a genuinely simple interface and adding new content that sees your caterpillar spread its wings to join a flight of beautiful butterflies.
Shotpro
While ARKit makes it easy to create your own augmented reality projects using Apple’s Xcode development environment, Unity or Unreal Engine 4, not everyone wants or needs to get hands-on with coding to merge the real and digital world
For budding CGI blockbuster moviemakers, 3D film visualization tool ShotPro is taking advantage of the ARKit platform to make embedding dragons and dinosaurs into real locations a simple drag and drop affair. The new AR features are set to come to the £39 app “in the fall when iOS 11 is released by Apple”.
Finding your friends at a festival
As well as big names, there are also plenty of smaller-scale developers taking advantage of the new tools that are already available thanks to preview builds of iOS.
While they might be less spectacular, many of them use augmented reality to provide innovative solutions to commonplace problems: this case, forthcoming ‘social AR’ app Neon demonstrates using augmented reality to throw up a sign indicating your friends’ location at a busy festival.
It might not be flashy, but it proves that augmented reality is ready to make the leap from a fun gimmick to a genuinely useful tool.
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