Apple’s ARKit has made a great impact on technology. It has multiple uses – from measuring up to space – x landings.
ARKit is Apple’s Augmented Reality platform for iOS devices. It helps the developers to produce apps that interact with the world by using the device’s camera and sensors.
What is Apple ARKit?
It is a development platform that helps app developers to build AR experiences into their apps and games very quickly and easily. It uses your iOS device’s camera, processors, and motion sensors. As a user, you do not actually understand if something is an ARKit enabled app or not. You can experience great fun and you will find a useful app.
ARKit uses a technology known as VIO (Virtual Inertial Odometry) to track the world around iOS devices. This enables the devices to sense how it moves in a room.
It uses the data not only to analyze a room’s layout, but it also detects horizontal planes like tables and floors.
What is the benefit of ARKit?
With the help of ARKit, developers are free to create all kinds of experiences.
One of the examples is of Ikea, which enables you to preview Ikea products in your own home before making a purchase.
ARKit opens up an entirely new category of apps that will run on every iOS device. Also, it opens many long- term possibilities.
As a part of iOS12 last year, Apple launched a second-generation version of ARKit which is launched alongside a Lego Concept featuring virtual lego pieces and mini-figures.
This was only done to demonstrate a key feature, i.e. Multiplayer. Now, different devices are able to see the same scene. They can also pause and resume whenever they want. Apple gave an example of an interior decoration project.
What types of AR apps exist?
There are generally two broad categories, i.e. location apps and market-based apps.
Market-Based Apps – These apps are based on image recognition with the use of black and white markers as triggers to display AR content. To see the Augmented component, you have to just point the camera on a marker’s position. Once the device recognizes the markers, the app overlays the digital data on this marker and then you can see the augmented object.
Location-Based Apps – These apps work without markers. It just detects the user’s position with the help of GPS on a digital compass and it overlays the objects on top of real physical places. The most famous app is Pokeman Go.
These apps send a notification to the user based on their location to give them the knowledge about the new AR content related to a given place.
Criteria to choose AR SDKs :-
It is very frustrating to choose a development kit, as there is ‘N’ number of tools available. The factors that you should look before choosing an SDK are :
i) Cost –
The developers who are developing for the first time, the best option for them are free to source AR SDKs.
The paid SDKs offer pricing plans depending on the user’s needs. Building a complex app with large, dynamic content requires a commercial license.
ii) Platform –
Developing an app for iOS or Android is very easy as there would not be any problem in choosing toolkit as all of them support them.
Developing apps in Windows or macOS, you have to choose the AR development Kit which supports UWP (Universal Windows Platform).
iii) Image Recognition –
This is the most important feature an AR app must have as it allows us to identify objects, places, images. For this, smartphones and other devices use machine vision together with camera and artificial intelligence software which helps to track images that can be later shown with animations, sound, HTML, contents, etc.
iv) 3D Recognition and Tracking –
It is one of the most valuable features of any Augmented Reality SDK. Because of the tracking, an app can enhance the large spaces around the user inside of large buildings. Application supporting this recognizes 3D objects like boxes, cups, tops, etc.