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Comment by aabajian | Hacker News Reader

I think AR kit is the most under-utilized API available on iOS. Combined with the U1 chip, you could make a real-world tagging-app. Post a note on your favorite trail or maybe overlay In n Out's secret menu on their real menu. How about AR Zoom backgrounds?

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I think you're spot on. The documentation for AR Kit is top notch, and includes TONS of sample code that is easily understandable with minimal iOS development knowledge.

Perhaps I'm still too new to AR Kit, but to me it doesn't look entirely straightforward (more backend lifting) to do someone of the things you are mentioning. I hope Apple releases some updated Geolocation API's to better enable the experiences you mention.

Kai Faust's [1] work with Infopop [2] is definitely worth playing around with

[1]: (https://twitter.com/kaifaust)

[2]: (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/infopop/id1530246692)

The building blocks for location based AR are pretty much all there:

- Azure Spatial Anchors (iOS, Android, HoloLens, ROS) [1]

- Google Cloud Anchors (iOS, Android) [2]

- Apple Geo Anchors (iOS & not all locations so not ready for use yet) [3]

Integration with these SDKs is pretty easy, and Azure Spatial Anchors and Google Cloud Anchors are production-ready. Minecraft Earth for example used Azure Spatial Anchors for shared multiplayer AR experiences. Infopop is nice, but doesn't have multiplayer or long-term persistence, so not really useful as-is. But wouldn't be surprised if it eventually uses one of these SDKs to provide better multiplayer + shared relocalization. You could probably throw together a rough version of Infopop in a week if sufficiently motivated, ARKit does a lot of the heavy lifting there.

[1]: (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/spatial-anchors/overv...)

[2]: (https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/java/cloud-anchors/...)

[3]: (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/argeoanchor)

Thanks for sharing the links to Google Cloud Anchors and Azure! Quickly looked through the docs of both, excited to try them out and see how well they work :)

I used Apple's Geo Anchors, but found it pretty limiting for my use case (labelling rock climbs outdoors), since it rely's heavily on street level data it seems

Yep, they're both pretty comparable in their API surface, and more general purpose than Apple Geo Anchors, as neither are tightly coupled with GPS. Rather you create an anchor and then save it to the cloud. On your own you can tie it to a GPS location if you'd like. Though Azure Spatial Anchors does have more functionality than Google Cloud Anchors (Coarse Relocalization + find nearby anchors in the anchor graph).

William Gibson predicted those use cases in his 1994 novel Virtual Light. He had artists creating works of art in physical locations that were only visible to people wearing AR goggles.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/59659/virtual-light...

I haven't tried it myself, but Reality Mixer is a neat application of person segmentation that I saw recently: https://twitter.com/reality_mixer

Impressive how well that works.

Thanks for sharing, good to know someone has built this!

Clearly, we need a ‘Wikiworld’ AR app for adding shared metadata to the world.

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