Why Apple’s Glasses Won’t Include ARKit
Matt Miesnieks (via Peter Steinberger):
I know glasses are being worked on at Apple, and the prototypes are state of the art. I also know what it takes to build a full-stack wearable AR HMD, having built fully functional prototypes from scratch. There are a bunch of elements that need to work before a consumer product can exist. These elements don’t all exist today (even at the state of the art).
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ARKit is a big deal for the AR industry. Not just because it’s got Apple’s marketing fairy dust, but because it means that developers now have a high quality “6dof pose” to use in AR Apps. Everything in AR is built on top of a high quality pose. Solid registration of digital assets in the world. Indoor & outdoor navigation. 3D reconstruction algorithms. Large scale tracking systems. Collision & Occlusion of digital & real. Gesture detection. All these only work as good as the pose the tracking system provides. My earlier article explains more about how Apple did this & how it all works.
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The most important advantage re the Glasses is that Apple has Marc Newson on the team. Look him up if you don’t really know who he is. He knows how to design cool glasses. One lesson I learnt at Samsung, is that Industrial Designers view glasses as one of the most difficult physical products to design, mostly because everyone’s face shape & taste is different, and there’s physically almost nothing to them (ie can’t add features to keep everyone happy, the design has to be very pure & simple).
