Get ready for thousands of augmented reality apps
Apple to make its entry into market that’s expected to be the next big thing
Millions of people turned Pokémon Go into a hit last year, tapping the app that morphed animation into the physical world.
That was quite the curtainraiser for augmented reality. Now, in what will be AR’s biggest mass-market push to date, Apple has thousands of apps — some say as many as 10,000 — ready to unleash in just a few weeks, with the launch of the new iPhone and the update to the iOS mobile operating system.
In June, Apple introduced software to make AR apps, called ARKit, giving developers several months to work on concepts.
Apple’s entrance into AR will “make it the major leader in AR almost overnight,” said Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies.
While we won’t see the new apps until the release of iOS 11, which comes at the end of the month, many developers have already started offering sneak peeks of their apps on YouTube and Twitter.
Among the offerings:
An IKEA app that lets you superimpose some 2,000 items from the home retailer into your living room.
A “The Walking Dead” game that brings zombie-like creatures from the AMC TV show to your neighborhood and lets you play shoot ’em up with them.
A Food Network dessert-decorating game that lets you doll up imaginary cakes, cupcakes and pies.
On Twitter, hundreds of examples are viewable under the the #MadewithARKit hashtag.
The concept of putting virtual objects into real-world settings is The Ikea AR app lets you imagine how furniture will look in your home.
a pretty huge hook for consumers, Bajarin said.
“We are going to see stuff we haven’t even dreamed of yet,” he said.
Virtual reality is the immersive, 360-degree technology that has been hyped as the next big thing, via headsets like Facebook’s Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, or Google’s $15 Cardboard viewer. A slew of 360 cameras have come out as well, but sales have not lived up to expectations.
Augmented reality is closely related, but it overlays the digital images onto physical spaces and doesn’t need a set of goggles — it can work on a smartphone. Cellphone users have already been toying with simple versions, trying to catch the Pokémon characters and grooving with the dancing AR hot dog that communications app Snapchat released this summer.
Al Ming, a developer for the Food Network’s mobile apps, thinks those that center in the home will be huge for consumers.
“It seems like a small thing, but it’s really impactful for how it feels,” he said. “It adds a sense of weight, going beyond the early entrants into the AR space. Here’s the real world; they happen to be on the same surface; it feels real, in a way that wasn’t.”
The initial apps look to be heavily weighted towards games and e-commerce tools, like Ikea’s. Don MacAskill, the CEO of photo-sharing site SmugMug, also sees great possibilities for conferences and photography.
“Say you’re at a conference; it’s your first time there and don’t know who anybody is,” he said. “You could have AR float the names of the speakers over their heads.”
For photography, as with the IKEA example, “you could figure out how that photo could fit into the space you inhabit,” he said. “If you could hold your phone up and see how this beautiful photo would look in your space, that would help bring photography into more people’s lives.”
Beyond Apple, Google also last week introduced its answer to ARKit, ARCore, meant to bring AR apps to Google’s Android system of telephones. But at launch, it will only be available on two newer phones, the Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S8. Google hasn’t said when ARCore will launch with functioning apps.
To play along with Apple, you will need one of the new iPhones expected to be unveiled later this month or the most recent models, the iPhone 7 (2016) or 6S (2015). Previous models won’t work.
Gene Munster, an investor and analyst for Loup Ventures, puts the number of the AR-capable universe at some 200 million iPhones at launch, growing to more than 250 million by the end of the year.
“We are going to see stuff we haven’t even dreamed of yet.” Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies