Although ARKit has yet to be released to the general public, intrepid developers have already shown off a wide range of possibilities for the platform — from the humorous and novel to the plainly pragmatic.
Since ARKit’s announcement less than two months ago, we’ve seen apps that can help you decorate your home to apps that can help you learn to dance. Its uses span from playing popular games like Minecraft to something as innocuous and practical as a virtual measuring tape. And today, we’re getting an another taste of what ARKit can do. An iOS developer named Andrew Hart has shown off a potential new use for the development toolkit: seamless augmented reality navigation.
ARKit + CoreLocation, part 2 pic.twitter.com/AyQiFyzlj3
— Andrew Hart (@AndrewProjDent) July 21, 2017
Hart shared new video on Twitter on Friday demonstrating his recent work with ARKit and CoreLocation. The video shows off an easy-to-follow pedestrian navigation app that overlays bold arrows and paths over a real-world environment. The result is a navigation app that’s incredibly intuitive and does away with needing to read any overhead maps or directions.
ARKit + CoreLocation pic.twitter.com/nTdKyGrBmv
— Andrew Hart (@AndrewProjDent) July 17, 2017
In another video, Hart shows how ARKit can be used to recognize local landmarks and provide useful information about them like name and relative distance. Such an app would be incredibly useful for newcomers to a city or tourists, and could make navigating local landmarks in an unfamiliar area incredibly easy.
ARKit is a powerful new development toolset unveiled by Apple during its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 5. According to the company, when it’s officially released, the toolset will turn iOS into the world’s largest augmented reality platform virtually overnight, since it doesn’t require any new hardware and iOS already has a massive user base and a community of dedicated app developers. ARKit is currently in its developer testing phase and should debut in the fall alongside the release of iOS 11. And when it does, it’ll definitely change the way we used our iPhones.