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Friday
Oct202017

Hands on with Canadian Made Apple AR Kit powered Apps

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

I recently had an opportunity to discover some of the latest Canadian-made ARKit apps for iOS. AR or Augmented Reality is a huge part of Apple's iOS 11 and the Apple ecosystem going forward.

I've seen implementations of AR before, around a year or so ago Lenovo and Motorola showed off their Project Tango smartphones. These were large phablets that used special cameras and sensors to 'project' 3D images into reality (as viewed through their screen). While the demos looked impressive, the hardware felt awkward and certainly more cumbersome than a regular smartphone.

With Apple's ARKit, Augmented Reality comes to existing iPhones and iPads, no extra hardware required. More impressive is that Apple's made it possible for existing app programmers to port their apps and enable AR functionality.

One example, Kings of Pool from Uken Studios (based in Toronto) is traditionally a top-view pool game, but with AR implemented it is possible to project a life-size pool table within a room. It is possible to resize this pool table, walk around it and play billiards virtually with a first-person perspective.

The demo, which was in running on an iPhone, was very smooth. Moving closer to the pool table, you can see the detail of the felt, the leather stitching  and the wood grain.

Another ARKit demo was Thomas and Friends Minis, an innovative game from Budge Studios where kids can build their own train tracks. The game can now place a virtual train track anywhere in the house and even has some special features.
 
Thomas & Friends Minis was built in three months and launched the same day iOS 11 released. This is a fun application that gives kids all the fun of building a trainset but with added animation and a large selection of add ons. Best of all, parents don't need to pick up after them.

Magicplan was another showstopper an app the simplifies the process of creating floor plans. Made by Montreal's Senseopia, the app uses the camera on iOS devices to measure spaces (up to 98 per cent accuracy) to create a floorplan and add any variety of furniture and fixtures. The developer created an accurate version of the demo room we were in within 40 seconds, which was very impressive.

Magicplan takes guesswork of how much building materials or paint they should buy for their DIY projects and provide homeowners and professionals like realtors, designers and contractors to easily create beautiful, professional floor plans.

Magicplan has been downloaded more than 13M times and up to 40,000 floor plans are created everyday. It is a revolutionary app for interior designers, architects, real estate professionals.

Tsuro, which is from Thunderbox Entertainment in Montreal, has the mission of making popular table top games available on mobile devices. Tsuro has been the No. 1 Board Game app in over 90 countries, and is now one of the first AR board games, letting you play as if you had the actual game right there in front of you, but with all the cool pyrotechnic effects and devious AI opponents of the app

The app can project a board games, cards, pieces other items on a flat surface. The difference, however, is that animations and special effects can take place through AR. The demo showed photorealistic  boardgame that looked exactly like a real boardgame.

The most impressive thing about ARKit is that all of the developers I spoke to said it was dead easy to ad the functionality to their apps. Apple has done a lot of the heavy lifting so, aside from making the assets suitable for 3D and AR, the feel and dynamics of the apps remain identical.

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