This iOS 11 AR measuring app will make you go “Whaaat?!”

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This iOS 11 AR measuring app will make you go “Whaaat?!”
With iOS 11 developer Beta 2 underway, coders around the globe are ever so excited to get down to building software that utilizes an array of new features that were announced at the WWDC 2017. Developer account holders have had only about three weeks to come up with iOS 11 apps, since the first beta launched, but we already have some exciting stuff in the AR category that really get us excited about ARKit’s potential.

Two recent posts on Twitter show videos of a measuring app that is bound to make you go “Whaaat?!”. At least we did. What really wows you are the smoothness and dynamics of the superimposition of elements, as well as the fact that no external hardware is involved in the whole ordeal.

One of the videos shows how you can use your smartphone’s camera to measure length by dropping pins on a surface and getting an astonishingly accurate measurement of the length between them, displayed as a floating 3D hologram. It’s kind of insane, if you think about it. The AR app also has no problem with shifting angles or distance to the objects you are measuring, and apparently adjusts itself to the right proportions of what the camera sees. 

The second video is even cooler than the first and shows how you can set a starting point for measurement, and then just drag your phone along the surface you want to measure. The app generates a hologram of a measuring tape on your screen that starts running in a vector line along the surface, looking ridiculously real and accurate in its count of length.


As Apple “changed the phone forever”, one would question whether such AR-enabled apps might initiate a whole new era of changing things forever, starting with simple objects, such as measuring tape.

Google’s Tango project, which is basically an AR platform that uses specific hardware gadgets to provide detailed AR-based feedback on your mobile device, also holds massive potential in the field. Tango obtains real-life measurements of your environment and lets you play around with virtual objects in your cam’s visual field, as if they were really there. However, the software is still somewhat glitchy and crashy, and lacks a sufficiently large enough pool of integrated apps.

In this regard, what we have seen in the iOS corner so far, and the lack of requirement for additional hardware, make us ponder on whether Apple’s ARKit won’t be the next big thing for the company’s customers. Even though we are still a few months away from iOS 11’s release, its Beta-developed features are already giving us too much to think and talk about.

via TheVerge

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