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Analysis
'Making invisible things visible': With iPhone 8 and iPhone X, Apple kicks off the augmented reality wars
With new phones purpose-built for AR experiences, Apple believes that how we use our phones is getting ready to change
By Matthew Braga, CBC News Posted: Sep 12, 2017 3:35 PM ET Last Updated: Sep 12, 2017 5:08 PM ET
Apple senior vice-president of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, introduces the iPhone X after a launch event in Cupertino, California, on Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017. (Stephen Lam/Reuters)
About The Author
Senior Technology Reporter
Matthew Braga will be the senior technology reporter for CBC News. He was once the Canadian editor of Motherboard, Vice Media's science and technology website, along with a business and technology reporter for the Financial Post. Email: matthew.braga@
If you want to know where technology is heading, make a tape measure. You can drag it across the floor, or run it along the frame of a doorway. Except this measuring tape is virtual — it exists solely on the watch's screen of an iPhone — and it's really about as accurate as the real thing.
A number of developers are working on apps just like this one, and you'll be capable to try them within the coming days. It may sound mundane, but that's precisely what can make it great. It's a sign that augmented reality — the layering of digital information onto someone's view with the physical world — gets both sufficient and accessible enough to be useful day-to-day.
It's also why, within the next several months you'll see two tech giants — Apple and Google — fighting to finally propel AR to the mainstream.
On Tuesday, in an event in the new Cupertino, Calif., office, Apple explained the way it plans to appear on top.
The company's new iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus phones include a new camera and image processor that it says has been specifically calibrated for augmented reality experiences. It's paired with new motion sensors — a gyroscope plus an accelerometer — that the company says can make tracking the phone's position and movement space more accurate.
On send out new high-end iPhone X, Apple says a front-facing depth sensor designed to let users unlock their phones with a glance will even improve the accuracy of augmented reality face-tracking — like the kind that Snapchat uses of its filters.
And its new mobile operating-system, iOS 11, will probably be released to the public on September 19 — and expose a huge mainstream audience of latest and recent iPhone owners, billions strong, to your varied new number of augmented reality apps.
"Apple has always thought that technology infused wth humanity could improve people's lives and change the planet," said CEO Tim Cook on stage inside Apple Park's Steve Jobs Theatre.
The Apple Campus 2 is seen under construction in Cupertino, California, in this aerial photo taken January 13, 2017. (Noah Berger/Reuters)
Apple is attempting to show that augmented reality on the smartphone are capable of doing a lot more than what we've seen to date from Snapchat or Pokemon Go. But it's to soon to say whether these experiences will in fact lead to your whole new method of interacting with the world and with your devices, as the tech industry hopes.
"It depends on one thing and — being honest — another thing only: it is dependent upon the excellence of the user experiences," says Brian Blau, an analyst with tech consulting firm Gartner who researches augmented and virtual reality technology. "There's a lot higher bar now."
Sensor fusion for that masses
During the keynote, Apple offered a glimpse at what it believes those experiences will look like. One was called The Machines, a multiplayer real-time strategy game where the play area is projected onto a floor or table, and players need to move to different vantage points round the board in order to play.
But more impressive was a brief demo from Major League Baseball's Advance Media Team. "You hold up your iPhone and see real-time player information and stats at the top of the action you're watching," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice-president of worldwide marketing.
Schiller shows popular features of the new iPhone 8 on Tuesday. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press)
Over earlier times year, Apple CEO Tim Cook has spoken in depth about how he believes AR experiences like these is going to be "big and profound" and could make the iPhone "a lot more essential pc currently is." In one interview, he even compared AR's potential reach to that of the smartphone itself.
"We don't must think the iPhone is approximately a certain demographic or country or vertical market — it's for anyone," he told the U.K. Independent "I think AR is that big, it's huge."
One approach to experience augmented the truth is with glasses or helmets that put digital information in front with the wearer's eyes. Microsoft may be working on the head-mounted display called Hololens, and Google has Glass But that technology is still in their infancy — and until it gets better, cheaper plus more accessible, Apple and Google made our minds up to focus on bringing a slightly less futuristic experience on the devices that hundreds of millions of people curently have.
To help a mobile phone identify surfaces and determine its position in a very room, both Apple and Google are going to do something called sensor fusing, where data through the accelerometer and compass is coupled with imagery in the camera. (Jason Reed/Reuters)
The approach that Apple and Google are choosing — something called sensor fusing, where data in the phone's accelerometer and compass is joined with imagery through the camera — has been around for a while. But here's what's new: First, both companies released toolkits , or APIs, this past summer to really succeed for developers to build AR apps. Apple's is termed ARKit , and Google's is AR Core You no longer have to be a computer vision expert to make something cutting-edge and cool.
Second, they're rolling those experiences in the market to recent iPhone and Android phones, no special hardware required. The processors in phones have gotten powerful enough, the sensors accurate enough and also the mapping algorithms smart enough to offer smartphones an unexpectedly good understanding of your user's relative position and movement by having a physical space.
"It's something to have augmented reality in academic circles, in papers and demo videos," Zach Lieberman says. "But to then provide an API behind it, and to have it in your hands in a device that doesn't cost a whole lot of and is quite fast and easy to use is very remarkable."
And Apple is inside unique position of being able to control the complete package, both hardware and software, which some think will offer an edge.
'The possibility to delight'
Lieberman, a developer, researcher and artist, spent some time working on a number of augmented reality projects lately. He likes the medium for its ability to "make invisible things visible." On Twitter , Lieberman continues to be posting short videos of some with the ARKit experiments he's made
In one, he suspends an audio waveform of his voice inside the air. To play it back, he has to physically retrace the waveform's path along with his phone. He says it only took him a few hours to build. In another, he demos a camera app where photos stay fixed in place on the location that they were taken, as being a photo album suspended mid-air.
Quick test of recording sound in space and playing back by moving through it (video has audio !) #openframeworks /GdZcK3rj1L
His eight-year-old daughter "gasped" the 1st time she saw that, Lieberman says. "I think that this technology has the possibility to bring a lot of delight."
Many of the experiences that have been demoed over the past several months have been made to do just that. One developer is working on a menu app that permits you to preview startlingly realistic-looking food on the plate There are drawing apps galore, and interactive stories. Many are still checking out the possibilities of projecting 3D objects into physical spaces — from Tesla vehicles to basketball players along with the Very Hungry Caterpillar Another person recreated A-Ha's classic 1984 music video for Take on Me
"People have no idea of what AR is yet, and they have ideas for it that it definitely can't do yet," Lieberman said. "But I have no doubt that people will figure this out."
More functional than a dancing hotdog
And obviously, you will find the measuring apps — up to now, the top demonstration of what this new technology can do.
Rinat Khanov, one from the developers behind the Safari ad blocker 1blocker , is focusing on one such measuring app. He calls it MeasureKit — and for a utility, it's really a delight to work with. You can point your phone at the edge of your table, drag a thin blue line towards the other end, and view the inches tick upwards along the way. It's functional in a very way a dancing hotdog isn't.
For jobs that do not require millimetre precision, it's wise pretty all-around what a real measuring tape shows. But it's not without its quirks. For one, the queue tends to drift from the starting point greater you move around.
Laan Labs is the one other development shop fighting for that crown of all accurate measurement app (theirs is known as AR Measure ). The company is three people — Jason Laan, his brother along with a childhood friend — who are actually working on AR projects for seven years. Face Swap Live could very well be their best known app, before Snapchat copied the feature. But Laan points with an earlier app called AR Soccer , developed long ago in 2010, to indicate how far smartphone AR has come.
"It did not really have a good understanding of the 3D world," Laan said. "Now with ARKit, you're in a position to get plenty of information about real-world tracking ideal out in the box. You don't ought to write all of that stuff yourself."
That used being the hard part. Now, in a world that's going to become awash in AR apps, obtaining the tech alone won't be enough. Developers will ought to figure out what it is that people will actually want to use.
There will be games and entertainment — like the interactive narrative from Peter Jackon's studio that Apple demoed back in June — but Laan thinks the arrival of more practical apps is where things get interesting. Measuring apps are simply just the start.
Tom Mainelli, an analyst at IDC who researches both AR and VR, believes the nascent marketplace for AR apps will probably be a lot like the early days in the App Store — plenty of gimmicks to the first couple of months, until developers evaluate what works.
"I think it absolutely will cause people to want to upgrade their phones," Mainelli says. "But I think there will be a fair level of skepticism until people feel it."
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