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Comment by huangc10 | Hacker News Reader

As a developer, this was the most exciting thing for me from today's WWDC opening speech. Can't wait to try this out myself. The demo they did with the AR game was really neat.

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It seemed quite mature for a v1 release. Then again it is hard to judge from an Apple demo but it did look nice.

I think there must have always been some way to do AR (Pokemon GO and other games) but I believe it always required a team to accomplish this and possibly work with engineers at Apple.

As an independent developer, I hope the AR kit will make it much easier for me to create something fun and possibly integrate with Siri and other kits. This is what I'm hoping for :D

I know VR is hot right now, but I've always had the thought AR > VR.

Wasn't Pokemon GO more like pseudo-AR? Like it just superimposed an animation with an alpha channel shadow but which otherwise had nothing to do with whatever the camera was looking at?

Yes. It's AR in that they overlaid something over the real world.

That's why the little bit during the demo was interesting. They showed Pokémon go using AR but it was actually doing it correctly, where the Pokémon stayed in position as they moved the camera around.

I was wondering what Pokémon Go would do on android. Will this feature be iOS only or will they implement their own version on android?

Yeah basically until now if you wanted to do AR you would need to role your own or use a third party library. Having ARKit as part of iOS will make building an AR app much easier.

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