Anyone has tried the new ARkit from Apple? Their demo with UnrealEngine was impressive in my opinion. I wanted to get a new iPAD for AR testing and potential works?
Can you suggest any good apps (iOS or Android) that you guys use for AR? Maybe any 3dsMax plugin? Google-ing I only found old stuff…not working with the latest 3ds max
I’d like to bump this topic. Have you learned anything more since you posted? I have a feeling this is one of those things that will be a ketchup effect.
Not yet, I was out on vacations. I think after the release of iOS 11 it will become a more popular topic
We’ll know more in the September 12th. I think it is going to be a big deal.
Indeed, specially as Apple is going to bring AR to phones, so millions of user will try first hand this new tech. Client will start asking for it very soon.
AR isn’t new, I did my first ar app 2011 I think.
I’ve made at least 30 since then.
Always on phones, android as well as apple.
All of them with vuforia for unity.
The new thing is: Ar kit can track markerless. So it can track any room with sufficient contrast.
We’ve been testing the ar kit and it’s pretty good. But not incredible.
We did our tests with unity. Our engine of choice.
It’s just for apple unfortunately, so you are f***** if your client demands an android version.
Apple also is quite picky in what they accept for the store. And they need a week for reviewing.
We’ve had some situations where we gave our app to apple a week before the deadline.
And Apple needs that whole week for telling us that they think its boring and it won’t will make it into the store.
We were then forced to put a ridiculous kind of “added value” into the app and wait for another week till it finally make its way into the store.
And apple tends to drop support for older things so, it could be that your app gets kicked from the store if apple thinks you should update to a new version.
Which, forces you to buy the newest apple iphone with the latest ios.
And if you are in bad luck you’d also have to buy the latest mac os for your Imac or mac book because the latest xcode won’t run.
You see: I love developing for apple.
(and I’ve not even started to talk about developer certificates, provisioning profiles and udids)
Having that said, I think AR and especially markerless tracking will be quite important on the arch viz market at some point.
But until than we’ll get easier access to it, at least for static scenes.
Optical quality is still a big problem on the realtime frontier (forget about your purchased trees with geometry leaves and millions of polys).
As soon as I read that I was thinking Ikea would probably go for something like this where you can pick furniture and then see how it will look in your house…
We’re currently developing exactly that actually. But not for Ikea. 
Cool beans 
I’d love an app that let me load my own .fbx models for miniature models viewed on a tabletop, and also life-size custom furniture placement on site.
Like mentioned before, this stuff isn’t anything new. About 5 years ago I had iPads on construction sites to look at how the building is going to look. However, I did have to have a paper target.
I agree. Same here…
No one said AR is a new thing. This time, Apple may make the difference as we all know the marketing power they have. If it becomes a trend, we will have more work. Simple as that. Win win situation
I think AR had its chance to get important and found its nieces. There might be new ones because of the markerless tracking. But since its pretty near to what we’ve already had all the time, I don’t think its going to be a revolution.
There will be some cool applications but mostly useless stuff just existing to show how cool that is.
Like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=371ZQW\_Yzck
In reality you are still staring at a small phone display. There is not much of entering another world. The hololens might change that at some point but I dont think everyone will have such a device at home in the near future.
The AR hype on exhibitions is over already. And even though its markerless now, its still AR and I don’t think the lack of a marker will cause a new hype for that kind of job. Maby a small one.
Gaming… it could be pretty interesting at some point I think. But now there are too many problems with bad tracking when the contrast in the picture is too low and the fairly small displays.
Ar was always a technologie which seems to be amazing, incredible useful and world-changing. But in the end there is not much hat can’t be done better/more useful and more user friendly without ar.
Operating instructions and maintance is a field where it is useful already.
It might be getting big now in Interior design because of the markerless tracking.
There is more, like education (more a marker tracking field) or Navigation (undemanding for 3d since you just need arrows and such stuff)
Just my two cents, I might be mistaken… Who knows… There were people who thought the internet was just a fad… So we just have to see.
Google’s ar core is here. And it seems to track better than arkit.
At least in our first tests.
Keep us posted! Google fan boy here…
I’m wondering about a depth sensing phone - Sony just released one with a 3d head avatar creating app and asus have their zenphone with a scanner built in. Maybe handy for small vfx set surveys…
Hi there mate,
Quick question for you… Do you know if there is any AR app out there were I can just upload my own 3d files? (fbx, 3ds…whatever).
I want to test the new AR kit but from what I saw online, you need to know how to code. Wondering if you know if there is smth ready on the store, or If I have to do it from scratch, is it smth that a beginner should try or too much trouble?
Thanks in advance!
Hi, sorry for the late reply.
I don’t know such app, but we made something similar for a client and it didn’t work too well. The problem is; you can’t simply inject a model in runtime. There are plugins for unity which do this. But they have big problems and are not quite user-friendly and pretty picky on what they accept and translate right.
And while you can build a material editor for editing materials in runtime you can’t bake the lighting or the reflections. It’s not easy (if even possible) to build a controllable system for such things. And the result will always look odd.
I don’t know how it is on the unreal side but I guess you’d fight similar problems.
From the perspective of the engine dev’s there is no reason for building the code needed to bake light and reflections into the app.
It would make the app much bigger and the calculation times for such things on a smartphone would be huge. I mean it would take days for more complex things.
BUT Unity is pretty easy to use and you don’t need coding to build a simple AR app for android using vuforia. I.e a model on a marker which isn’t interactive or something.
I think this would also be the case for AR core (using the example package) but I’m not sure.
Thanks for your reply. I thought it would be an easier task, with an app out there which reads a marker, and associates it with a random 3d model you upload.
But I see what you say. And thanks for mentioning Vuforia, looks interesting and not complicated. Will download Unity and give it a try for sure!