Augmented Reality
WHAT IT DOES, AND WHY IT'S TIME TO GET ON BOARD
Mac|Life investigates what today’s Augment Reality developments have to offer, plus we review the very best AR apps on the market.
HEAD BACK TO the science fiction of the 1990s and you often find protagonists immersed in virtual worlds. These frequently lurid, neon–clad spaces, packed full of “computer code” imagery (this was the 1990s, after all) were usually accessed by way of a hefty headset and allowed the user to go anywhere — or any when.
Today, the onset of consumer– accessible virtual reality has largely transformed science fiction into science fact (and, in Spielberg flick
Ready Player One, also dystopian future) — but the requirement to wear a headset hasn’t (yet) gone away. Fortunately, augmented reality offers us an alternative — and one that’s more broadly useful.
Augmented reality takes a step back from placing the user within entirely virtual confines. Instead, it seeks to merge digital objects with the real world that you see. Through Apple devices, this concept is accessible and portable because the augmented fusion is one that exists solely on your device’s display. Fire up an AR app or game, and digital components are projected on to your real–world surroundings.
ALL ANGLES
Although these elements are confined within the window of your device’s viewport, that doesn’t mean the level of immersion is necessarily less effective than a trip to VR. Sure, the augmented world doesn’t take over your entire field of view (although it one day might), but an iPhone or an iPad can be carried with you and used almost anywhere. (Unlike the aforementioned headsets, which are probably a bad idea to use when, say, walking near traffic.) And AR scenes can be explored from any angle in which you can point your device and still manage to look at it.
The pulp sci–fi references, however, perhaps distract from the pragmatic and utilitarian nature of much augmented reality. And, to be fair, Apple didn’t help matters given that its early AR marketing involved a still of a massive stompy dinosaur bellowing on a highway. This smacked of gimmick, and yet the best of AR is anything but gimmicky.
From a practical standpoint, augmented reality apps can quickly project virtual objects into your living space. IKEA Place (free) was one of the first to successfully do so, giving you realistic depictions of IKEA products
you could place in your home rather than suffering actually having to visit a store, buy some flat-pack furniture, take it home, put it together, and then decide it doesn’t actually fit after all. Wanna Kicks (free) entertainingly does much the same for sneakers, mapping virtual footwear on to your feet with uncanny accuracy. And for most of us, it’s fair to say the B&O AR Experience (free) is probably the only way we’re ever likely to get a $3,000–plus Beosound Edge speaker in our lounge!
Beyond shopping, AR can assist with route finding. Hiking app
ViewRanger projects directional arrows on to your surroundings and also identifies distant peaks, giving you a fighting chance of not losing your way in the wilderness. Several apps for city dwellers provide live directions, too, albeit more often for the likes of the nearest coffee house, ATM, or restaurant.
When you want to learn, AR’s also got plenty to offer, in part because it can bring the otherwise inaccessible before you. For example, Insight Heart ($1.99) allows you to explore the heart from any angle, showing how various conditions, such as hypertension, affect the organ. Not one for the squeamish, perhaps, but this sort of thing has the potential to provide real understanding in the manner a still image on the printed page simply cannot convey. Similarly, astronomy app Night Sky (free, IAPs) lets you grab a constellation from a view of the heavens, expand it, walk around it, and more fully comprehend how each star relates to the others — far more so than when staring at any flat image, no matter how beautifully illustrated.
All of these experiences exist for consumers because Apple took a big risk on AR, baking it into the heart of iOS 11. Instantly, Apple’s mobile operating system became the largest AR platform on the planet. And right from the off, it was impressive, not only merging the virtual and the real, but even taking lighting cues from your local environment.
Suitably galvanized, Apple relentlessly iterated. As of ARKit 1.5, AR apps on Apple devices can detect vertical as well as horizontal planes, revolutionizing everything from AR
gaming to educational fare. With iOS 12 came ARKit 2, which brought big improvements to object detection in 3D spaces. Apple simultaneously unveiled its Measure app: a technical feat that lets you use an iPhone to measure anything from rooms to pieces of paper. Although perhaps don’t rely too heavily on it for accuracy! Shared multiplayer experiences also arrived with ARKit 2, alongside the persistent tracking of objects in a virtual world.
In this year’s iOS 13, ARKit 3 grows more powerful still. Whereas previous iterations of the technology were about perfecting the overlap of virtual and physical spaces, this update focused on bringing human beings into AR. With people occlusion, you can exist in an AR scene, and the AR objects around you are automatically masked as appropriate. In other words, virtual objects can now move intelligently around a human figure, rather than arbitrarily disappearing in a way that doesn’t look natural and realistic. Coupled with this, motion capture functionality allows human movement to be tracked and
converted into input data for apps and games alike.
Quite where this will head in the future, it’s hard to say. Presumably, Apple’s ambitions are for the virtual and real worlds to become effectively seamless. But we’re not there yet — AR apps can sometimes suffer from the wobbles, and objects often stick out a bit like early CGI in films. But the pace of development has been swift. Moreover, it’s increasingly clear Apple wants to empower more than just professional app creators when it comes to building AR experiences.
Over a year ago, Apple rolled an AR module into iPad coding tutorial app Swift Playgrounds (free). This year, it released Reality Composer (free). Complete with a built-in library of varied objects, it’s designed to let a wide range of people experiment with prototyping AR experiences that can subsequently be integrated into Xcode or exported to AR Quick Look.
Of course, Apple’s not alone in the AR space. Most notably, Android has Google ARCore, which broadly speaking is a step behind ARKit at any given moment. However, its existence does mean AR experiences you’ll find on iPhone and iPad sometimes make their way to Android devices — and Android’s huge user–base increases the scope for those companies exploring other areas in AR hardware.
The most interesting development is undoubtedly AR glasses. A logical next step, they essentially place AR screens over your eyes, giving you something close to the VR experience but without wiping the real world from your field of view — and also without the need for more cumbersome headgear. At the time of writing, Facebook was reported to be working on smart glasses with Ray-Ban — but another rumor is rattling around, too…
Reportedly, references have been found in iOS 13 that suggest Apple’s working on AR headsets that link to an iPhone and offer stereo-enabled AR apps — that is, apps outputting to two displays like you’d expect to find in glasses. Perhaps the next big Apple thing won’t be a device you look at several times a day, but one you stare through whenever you’re awake.