Apple just announced that iOS 11 will be released on September 19, 2017. What’s so special about iOS 11 is it adds an amazing Augmented Reality framework, ARKit. It allows people to easily create unparalleled augmented reality experiences for iPhone and iPad. It has an accurate tracking of device movement. It can analyze the scene presented by the camera view and find horizontal and vertical planes in the real world. It can place and track virtual objects on the plane with a high degree of accuracy without additional calibration.
Supported iOS Devices
ARKit requires a lot of computational power, so it requires iOS devices with an Apple A9, A10, and newer processors. The following devices are able to run ARKit:
- iPhone 6s and 6s Plus
- iPhone 7 and 7 Plus
- iPhone 8 and 8 Plus
- iPhone X
- iPhone SE
- iPad Pro (9.7, 10.5 and 12.9)
- iPad (2017)
Playing with ARKit and FME
iOS ARKit is able to display Wavefront OBJ models. Since we can easily create OBJ models in FME, we created a simple app that displays OBJ models output from FME:
We also processed GPS data from hiking and created an OBJ model using FME:
ARKit has a lot of potential use cases and there are still ideas we are planning to explore. Stay tuned for part two!
Angus Lau
