BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Apple ARKit -- Hands On With Augmented Reality, Star Wars And Walking Dead. Spoiler: It Rocks

Following
This article is more than 6 years old.

Touch Press

Augmented Reality, as you know, is a technology that allows data from the web to be overlaid on a view of the physical world. The most famous example is Pokémon Go, though there are many others. One of the first for the iPhone was Nearest Tube, a British app which helped tourists, and locals, find their way to the closest London Underground station.

Hold your iPhone aloft and flags would appear in the air, it seemed, showing the nearest station and the train lines at each, color-coded for ease.

It was awesome.

But much AR was creaky and inexpertly compiled. So the image you saw on your screen would jiggle or move when it shouldn’t, say.

When Apple announced that it liked AR, and that the next version of iOS software would be designed to make the most of it, expectations were high.

I’ve spent a day with AR developers, checking out their apps. Some were okay, some were brilliant. Actually, considering developers have only been able to create apps using the ARKit software since early June, what they’ve done is pretty amazing.

To be clear, the videos you may have seen are impressive and detailed, but playing the apps directly is a whole other thing. The intimate connection between you and the virtual world has to be seen to be enjoyed.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Much of the announced material is games and the developers I met were varied and their products designed to appeal to all ages. First up, there was one for the littl’uns: The Very Hungry Caterpillar from Touch Press.

If you’re a fan of the children’s book of the same name, by Eric Carle, you won’t want your childhood favorite to be messed around with. Touch Press is a brilliant British software house that produces apps like The Elements by Theodore Gray, Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Solar System for iPad.

It has created a virtual pet, a charming 3D caterpillar who hatches from an egg and sits on your floor, surrounded by trees. Wherever you are, the caterpillar always comes towards you, which creates a cute bond between gamer and game. You throw apples onto the floor and watch as he eats his way through them. And as the game progresses, he grows until he finally hatches into a butterfly.

It’s designed to work well at a low level, right next to the floor, exactly where a child might be. There are other characters such as a grouchy Ladybug to interact with and it's well-pitched for a young player. And, no, you can't accidentally kill the caterpillar, don't worry.

Climax Studios

Arise

Aimed at slightly older children is Arise, from Climax Studios. Here, a 3D structure appears in the middle of your room. Place it on your table is my suggestion because you’ll be moving around it. There are no buttons to press, your aim is to cleverly angle the iPad or iPhone so that two parts of the landscape which are completely separated appear on top of each other to form an impossible connection. Line of sight and perspective are the only controls.

This was perhaps the most impressive game I saw, not least because it did something I’ve not quite seen in AR before: everything was perfectly fixed in place, not drifting or images corrupting the more you moved.

This is something Apple claims to have worked hard to achieve and it seems to have accomplished it if the examples I’ve seen are anything to go by.

There is subtlety to the coding which means you can make it work in large or small rooms, and zooming in is a simple matter of walking forwards with the iPhone or iPad in your hands.

AR lives or dies according to how convincing it is, and the lack of drift is a big part of the persuasiveness of games like Arise.

AMC & Next Games

The Walking Dead: Our World

At the other end of the age range is The Walking Dead: Our World, which brings the undead into the living room, complete with a suitably surprising moment when you turn round to find a slavering zombie is making its way towards you across the carpet at speed. It’s quite a different experience from when that Hungry Caterpillar was approaching. Fans of the series will be pleased to see that several favorite characters are in the game, to fight the zombies beside you.

Again, placement of characters when I played was secure, they really seemed to have weight, to be planted on the floor, not floating above it as is common in AR.

And scale is important, too. This was another Apple imperative that everything had to be the right size and the ARKit software does this by measuring the space with fine accuracy.

IKEA

IKEA Place

That really comes into its own with an app like IKEA Place, where knowing how big an armchair, table or couch is can be crucial. Obviously this isn’t a game, though it is fun.

You choose from a series of IKEA furnishings and objects. Pick the colour and fabric and as you choose it, it hovers in the air and lands firmly, giving rise to a puff of dust that almost makes you think you really should have cleaned the carpet.

Then you can move around the room, knowing that the chair, say, is exactly the right scale so if you can squeeze it in to a corner on the app, then you can when you collect the real one from the store.

Oh, and this app really shows off the other Apple imperative: lighting. A realistic 3D figure that’s over-bright in a dim room suddenly fails to impress. But Apple has built adjustable lighting into ARKit, so in a poorly lit room, the IKEA item doesn’t look out of place. IKEA’s 3D images are very well done and highly detailed, so you can look under the legs of a sofa bed to see your room behind.

It’s quietly impressive.

When app developers’ ingenuity is given a good enough blank canvas, imagination and creativity follow. Like in the Star Wars Holochess game which Disney is working on. It places a holochess game in the middle of your room complete with 3D characters roaming the board. Choose a side and your team of monsters move across the board, attacking each other in their individual styles.

It’s very cleverly done and has one brilliant hidden extra: the metallic frame of the chess board gleams. You can even see a reflection in its circular side. Look closely and you’ll see it’s the interior of the Millennium Falcon.

When the App Store arrived in 2008, it was a time when nobody knew exactly how big apps could become. So, this is the dawn of mainstream AR – at launch it will be available on so many iPhones and iPads that it will instantly become the largest installed base of AR equipment. Not all of it will be worthwhile or even fun, but it’s an intriguing, amazing world in prospect.

More on Forbes

Week In Wearables: New Apple Watch 3 Leak, Samsung Gear S Incoming, watchOS 4 Beta Lands

Samsung Confirms It's Working On A Smart Speaker To Rival Apple HomePod, Amazon Echo

New Samsung Gear Fit2 Pro Leak Reveals Swim-Friendly Smartwatch

Latch's New Smart Lock Is Compatible With Apple HomeKit, Springs Open To 'Hey, Siri'

New Apple Watch 3 Rumor Predicts Surprise Omission

The One Thing That Could Be A Game-Changer For The New Nokia 8

Follow me on Twitter