Is Apple ready for the AR leap?
Mission: Transform geeky sideshow into mass-market fad
The tech titan’s mission is quite simple: make this geeky sideshow a mass-market staple. Obviously, however, there are several things that need to be addressed.
Apple’s iphone may be ready for its next big act — as a springboard into augmented reality, a technology that projects life-like images into real-world settings viewed through a screen.
If you’ve heard about AR at all, it’s most likely because you’ve encountered Pokemon GO, in which players wander around neighbourhoods trying to capture monsters only they can see on their phones. AR is also making its way into education and some industrial applications, such as product assembly and warehouse inventory management.
Now Apple is hoping to transform the technology from a geeky sideshow into a mass-market phenomenon. It’s embedding ARready technology into its iPhones later this year, potentially setting the stage for a rush of new apps that blur the line between reality and digital representation in new and imaginative ways.
“This is one of those huge things that we’ll look back at and marvel on the start of it,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts during a Tuesday conference call. Many analysts agree. “This is the most important platform that Apple has created since the app store in 2008,” said Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research.
There’s just one catch: no one can yet point to a killer app for AR, at least beyond the year-old (and fading) fad of Pokemon GO. Instead, analysts argue more generally that AR creates enormous potential for new games, home-remodelling apps that let you visualise new furnishings and decor in an existing room, education, healthcare and more.
For the moment, though, we’re basically stuck with demos created by developers, including a Star Wars-like droid rolling past a dog that doesn’t realise it’s there; a digital replica of Houston on a table; and a virtual tour of Vincent Van Gogh’s bedroom. At Apple, the introduction of AR gets underway in September with the release of iOS 11, the next version of the operating system that powers hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads around the world.
Tucked away in that release is an AR toolkit intended to help software developers create new AR apps.
Those apps, however, won’t work on just any Apple device — only the iPhone 6S and later models, including the hotly-anticipated nextgeneration iPhone that Apple will release this fall. The 2017 iPad and iPad Pro will run AR apps as well.
Tim Merel, managing director of technology consulting firm DigiCapital, believes Apple’s entry into AR will catalyse the field. His firm expects AR to mushroom into an $83 billion market by 2021, up from $1.2 billion last year.
That estimate assumes that Apple and its rivals will expand beyond AR software to high-tech glasses and other devices, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens headset.
For now, though, nothing appears better suited for interacting with augmented reality than the smartphone. —