Skip to Content
Silicon Valley

Apple’s software improvements could make AR as universal as iOS

Apple would clearly like its new mobile operating system to take augmented reality mainstream.

The news: Apple unveiled iOS 12 at its Worldwide Developers Conference today, and some of the most buzzworthy features have to do with bringing new AR experiences to the iPhone and iPad.

For example: A new AR app called Measure lets users gauge the size of objects in the real world—like the suitcase that Apple exec Craig Federighi measured on stage using the app. A new AR development kit introduces a multiplayer mode for AR games, improved face tracking, and 3-D object detection. A demo from Lego showed how the new tools can add digital overlays to scans of physical Lego structures. Apple also announced that it has worked with Pixar to create a new AR file format, called USDZ, which makes it much easier to share across the iOS ecosystem.

AR for everyone? Look no further than Pokémon Go to see that AR has compelling consumer market potential. Apple’s betting its new AR tools will open the floodgates even further.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.