editorial team
Apple is on a little bit of a roll lately introducing new products. It was posted here just last month when iPhone XS and XS Max launch events were held, and at a recent mini-convention in New York, Tim Cook unveiled a new MacBook Air and iPad Pro. It’s been an exciting time for the company, and has set up what’s bound to be an incredible holiday season of new product sales. Conspicuously absent from the new products however is a pair of augmented reality glasses that have long been rumored to be in the works at Apple.
To be clear, the company’s ARKit development system and other existing tech has already made augmented reality possible on various iPhones, and not just the brand new ones. It’s also been said that the new iPad Pro allows for the best AR experience on any device, indicating that the company is still focusing on improving augmented reality for customers. Even if a device like the 2018 iPad Pro has tech capable of rendering AR in sensational, convincing detail, however, it retains one fatal flaw: you have to look through the screen to see AR. That is, with a phone or tablet, the only affected part of your environment is that little square of it you can see through a screen. The real world around you can break the AR illusion in a way that makes it somewhat underwhelming.
This is the problem that glasses will solve if and when they make it to market – which seems like a certainty, even if the glasses were left out of the fall announcements for 2018. By bringing AR straight to our eyes, glasses will allow us to see the space around us seamlessly integrating with AR elements. Not to mention our hands will be free without having to hold up phones or tablets to look through. To get a better idea of how this will improve the AR experience, consider a few specific examples.
Build Higher & Wider
One of the first augmented reality apps to make an impression was Stack AR, a sort of fast-paced puzzle game challenging you to “stack” colorful slates in 3D slates for as long as you can. If you don’t tap your screen to stop a slate zooming onto it exactly on top of the previous slate, the area that is over the edge is sliced off, such that each new slate can either fit exactly or leave a smaller area for the next one to fit on. It’s a fun game because it sort of allows you to build colorful little towers in real space, and it’s clearly a harbinger for other building and 3D puzzle games such as Minecraft and countless others in AR. Unfortunately though, as these games exist currently, you can only see the bits of your tower or puzzle that a small screen can encompass, which sort of defeats the fun of doing it in real space. With AR glasses on, you could conceivably “stack” a building’s worth of slates and actually see it all at once.
Play Cards With Hands, Not Touches
There have been some interesting examples of poker and other games flirting with virtual space. Poker games online now have live dealers in some cases, and table games have even made their way onto mobile devices. Naturally this has led people to consider what it will be like when good casino and card games make it to AR in significant numbers. But right now, the idea actually seems limiting. Is it really any more fun to aim your phone or tablet at a table to see virtual cards on it and still have to tap the screen to play with them? Frankly it just sounds like an unnecessarily complicated version of a perfectly fine mobile game. However, with AR glasses on, you might not have to tap the screen, but instead reach out and “touch” the cards with your hands to play them. This is a step up from a mobile game, and means that not just casino games but any card or tabletop games could become great fun with AR glasses.
See Your Enemies Coming
Shooting games are popular anywhere they turn up, and that includes in AR. People already enjoy the idea of being able to look around a room through a phone and see various creatures or bad guys lurking, waiting to be terminated. Think of it like Pokémon GO, but with a hunting aspect. It’s an enjoyable concept for fans of shooters or people who just want to experiment with what AR can do, but when you really think about it, mobile AR as currently constructed basically means you have to make your own enemies materialize. You need to show them through your phone and then shoot them, once you’re already staring at them. With glasses, things could be more spontaneous. You could see your enemies coming, rather than finding them before you even start.
Lay Out A Whole Room
Getting away from gaming, it’s definitely of note that there are a lot of AR apps that let you visualize home improvement on your phone. This has somewhat unexpectedly become the most talked about AR category aside from gaming, and it’s a fairly awesome development. Basically, people can look through phones to see what a new piece of furniture, a decoration, or even a home repair might look like. Here too though you’re basically limited to a screen-sized snapshot, which is helpful, but not 100 percent realistic. With AR glasses, you could conceivably lay out an entire room and get a virtual picture of it. You could see what a whole set of furniture looks like, paint the walls, and hang some art, and then look at the whole picture at once. It would be invaluable for a lot of people who take an active role in designing their homes.
