Homecourt Sports and Directive Games used the new introduced iPhones to showcase some of ARKit 2’s capabilities, such as multiplayer support.
The ARKit version 2, which introduces multiplayer and persistence and improves surface and object detection, will be available next 17 september as part of the free upgrade of iOS 12, as the company shared in the keynote where they mainly presented their new range of smartphones: the Xs, Xs Max and Xr. These new terminals incorporate the A12 Bionic processor that has eight cores for the neural engine, faster than those of its predecessor, allowing new capabilities such as faster plane detection for ARKit and new functions to apply real-time machine learning algorithms. In addition, developers can run Core ML more efficiently on such a processor (up to 9 times faster).
To test the capabilities of the new iPhones, several companies took the stage to present their projects that they will launch this fall. HomeCourt Sports showed how the upcoming update to its basketball player training app will improve its visual analytics capability to deliver new metrics.
Directive Games presented Galaga AR, a multiplayer experience with ARKit 2 that evolves the classic game to take it to the real world. In the demo they made, a total of 3 people competed shooting different enemies. As they commented, there will be more experiences of this type with other arcade games. Bethesda also had its role with The Elder Scroll: Blades, a game that will have virtual reality on PC and that will come this year to iOS.
The new version of Apple’s operating system will also introduce an application to measure objects with augmented reality and the AR Quick Look function, with which to visualize virtual objects in AR.
