We are back from WWDC, the annual Apple developer conference, where Apple made two very cool announcements: they are finally officially entering VR, in collaboration with HTC Vive. And they are also entering Augmented Reality (AR), with ARKit, a software development kit (SDK) to develop AR applications for iOS, available with iOS11 coming in September.
We already have the VR part covered, through our work with WebVR, and it’s already running on the new Macs with Firefox.
As for the AR part, we started geeking around ARkit, and we already have a proof of concept working through a webview in a native app! Here is a quick video demo:
? Playing with #ARKit + @Sketchfab with a WebView in a native app! Tracking is fabulous (? from the @BritishMuseum https://t.co/1G2JwE6iW9) pic.twitter.com/miwpxBR4V0
— alban denoyel (@albn) June 15, 2017
This means two things:
- You will be able to very easily publish AR content on iOS with Sketchfab – no dev skills required, no need to develop your own app!
- You will be able to browse more than 1.5 million things in AR through Sketchfab.
This is a big step for AR, as iOS is a very popular mobile platform, and because ARKit offers good AR support out of the box, without requiring specific additional hardware.
And if you are a developer working on an AR app but don’t have 3D content, we can help! Here are more than 100k 3D models available for free download under a Creative Commons license.
We’ll keep you posted on our progress!
About the author
Alban Denoyel
Co-founder and CEO of Sketchfab.
