Our plans for iPhone ARKit
First, let me say, thanks to everyone that helped out or swung by to chat with us during iPhone Dev Camp. It was a pleasure to meet all of you, and if you email me I promise I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Let me now address the burning question of: “What the hell are you guys doing?”
The answer, at least right now, is writing this blog and trying to keep up with our day-jobs. But that’s now what you care about.
The iPhone ARKit
Our long term plan is to make ARKit as similar to MapKit as we can get away with. You should be able to pass it a list of geographic points and it’ll call back out to you for instructions on how to draw the view. Our library will handle, based on the location of the objects you specify, using CLLocation objects, where on the screen the view should be drawn on any given paint loop.
Further, we hope that, someday, we’ll be able to draw a MapKit view when the phone is parallel to the ground, and the ARKit view when the device is held up in the air. This will, of course, be a feature that can be turned on and off from the outside.
For now, we’re jamming on fitting the package into what resembles a MapKit API. We would LOVE to have help going forward, but right now, at least while we get things organized, we’d appreciate it if you gave us a few days to catch our breath. The app was a pretty heavy hack-job for the demo, however, if you absolutely must start working on your ARKit powered application _right now_ I’d suggest building it as a MapKit application and then sucking in our API when it’s in good shape.
Please feel free to mail me if you have questions. My address is: haseman [at] wanderingOak dot net.
August 8th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
I am very excited to see what you guys can roll out with in the next couple of weeks. From playing with your demo app it is very apparent that it is only a proof of concept. When adding locations that are near to the iphone’s location there are major accuracy errors. Hope you guys get everything ironed out. When you are prepared to receive help on the project I will be more than happy to lend a hand.
August 8th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Thanks for the update, I’ll check it out and see what we can do about the geographic calculations
August 13th, 2009 at 8:18 am
Great work!
Our NSCoder Night group (Lake Forest) has started using it on a ghost hunting app we are developing – long before Arshad’s ghost demo, I should add.
2 areas that MapKit does not offer good support, but seem critical to our needs and future ARKit use:
- Ability to move “annotations” easily
- Scaling of “annotations” on zoom (or, in ARKit, based on the distance to the object).
A tilt/accelerometer fall-back option for devices without heading hardware would also be a welcome feature.
Feel free to contact me directly to discuss how we are using ARKit and/or how we can help.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
[...] Docs page, they’ve given more insight into their goals and why they’ve taken on the project. Wednesday of last week I turned to my co-worker Zac White and asked if he’d thought about a [...]
August 31st, 2009 at 9:04 pm
will the ARKit support the 3D object tracking based AR as well as the map-based version of AR?
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:21 am
Not as of yet. However, I think there is another open source project to tackle the 3d object tracking for the iPhone