Apple demos ARKit, a mobile augmented reality development platform
In addition an announcement for virtual reality support in the new iMac Pro earlier during the WWDC presentation on Monday, Apple also unveiled a new tool called ARKit.
The development platform is Apple’s augmented reality tool for bringing AR apps to iOS 11, which sends a huge message to developers that the next version of Apple’s mobile platform will be AR-focused in a big way.
ARKit includes scale estimation, motion tracking, ambient light estimation, and support for Unity, Unreal and SceneKit virtual environment development tools.
To show off the power and capability of ARKit, Apple showed off a brief Pokémon Go demo and then had the developers of Wingnut AR show off the studio's AR game live onstage using an iPad.
The game, backed by director Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame, performed flawlessly on a table top, with one of the developers showing off the location-sensitive ability to walk around the AR game in real time.
Of course, there's still no word on a possible wearable AR device that has been rumored for months, but with ARKit, Apple is sending a clear signal that it intends to be one of the biggest AR platforms on the planet.
ARKit designed to work with iOS 11, which drops this fall.
