This week, augmented reality took another step toward becoming much more than just an add-on.
On Monday, at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California, Apple introduced the next gen of its ARKit augmented reality platform. Version 2 allows multiple players to interact in real time with the same objects in a single space, and it allows objects to permanently reside in a specific location.
There is also 3D object detection, improved face tracking, realistic rendering, and, in collaboration with animation studio Pixar, a new, open and zero-compression file format called USDZ that allows AR files to be exchanged across Apple and other applications. Plus, the multiperson interaction works between phone and phone, not with the cloud, because of privacy concerns.
These new capabilities begin to offer some tangible reasons why Apple CEO Tim Cook told the UK’s Independent last year that AR is “a big idea, like the smartphone.”
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