First Apple killed the headphone jack — now it’s coming for your ruler, with new AR features
Apple's SVP of software Craig Federighi unveiled iOS 12 at WWDC 2018 today, and aside from massive performance upgrades, there's a major new focus on augmented reality.
Apple is adding its own AR apps to iOS 12, built on its augmented reality platform ARKit that debuted at WWDC last year.
One of the more exciting apps it showed of is called Measure, which will let you measure the length of any real world objects using just your iPhone. It's essentially a digital tape measure that you can use by pointing your phone's camera at an object.
The company also announced a new augmented reality file format called Universal Scene Description (USDZ). Apple explained that USDZ was built in collaboration with Pixar animators and is an open file format that can be used for creating and sharing 3D augmented reality media in a single file.
For example, in a demonstration shown on stage, it was used to pull an image from a website like a Fender guitar and then drop a digital version of that product into the real world using augmented reality on the iPhone. This means in the near future, people will be able to pull things from the web and be able to toy around with them in augmented reality.
The technologies shown off in Measure and the USDZ support will all be found in ARKit 2.0. Apple also improved on rendering time in the real world, a crucial part of how augmented reality works.
As rumored, Apple is also unveiling Shared Experiences within ARKit 2.0 for iOS 12. This will allow you to have AR experiences with another user or to game with another. You have up to 3 people interacting at once, with one of them in watching only mode.
Shared Experiences seems really cool and will likely be especially popular amongst game developers. On stage, Lego demoed a new experience in which you can use a real lego set and play on top of it. They also used this example to showcase that with ARKit 2.0, you can save what is on screen and pick it up at a later time.
