Hacker News Reader

> In conclusion, Apple is currently stuck between a rock and a hard place. It's somewhat late to market with ARKit, will have to compete with Facebook, Google, and Snapchat for consumer AR-oriented developer mindshare, and will have no play at the industrial/enterprise market if it limits its tools to development for the iOS family.

See also portable music, phones, tablets …

It's Apple's SOP, and if they've shown anything in the last 10-15 years, entering markets late is not a barrier to them competing

> In conclusion, Apple is . . . somewhat late to market . . . The best way for Apple to alleviate this jam is to release its own AR glasses/headset, which it is widely rumored to be developing.

I'm not sure this line of reasoning holds up. You mention 3 markets:

1. consumer

2. enterprise

3. the "market" for developer mindshare

Apple doesn't especially care about being early or late to any of these markets. Let's take them one by one.

1. There is currently no real consumer market for AR, so Apple is not late. And I don't see any reason why Apple would not be content to wait and see if one develops. It's not clear how releasing an improved version of Google Glass saves Apple from any kind of "jam". People are not clamoring for this type of product, because its value is highly unclear.

2. There is currently no real enterprise market for AR, so Apple is not late. Apple has no history of making industrial equipment. Are you saying Apple is about to take the unusual step of starting a whole new sales channel, targeting a whole new class of buyers, to try to get first-mover advantage in a new and unproven market helping warehouse workers do line monitoring and "remote help"? It seems unlikely.

3. Apple has a huge, strong developer base it is in no danger of losing. Again, it's not clear how offering an AR SDK gets them out of a jam.

If I had to guess as to why they are playing in this area, it may be to help seed the ground with more iOS devs familiar with this tech, so that in the event that the market does develop, they are in a good position to harvest ideas, talent, and apps.

1. Consumer AR market - mobile phone AR-enabled applications - education/gaming/entertainment/enhanced retail. Niantic, Blippar, Catchoom, Snapchat would all beg to differ that this market does not exist.

2. Enterprise/industrial AR market - wearable AR-enabled applications - I've already listed them. This market is very small currently...but it exists. I've talked to engineers and AR tool vendors in this market, creating applications for Vuzix, Epson devices. My argument is that this portion of the market will see a lot of growth over the next 5 years. Hard to explain Microsoft's play with Hololens, or PTC's ThingWorx Studio tracking tech away.

3. They are in a jam with AR application developers specifically, not all developers as a whole. You're right they have a large, strong mobile developer base, but AR developers will move away from mobile/tablet-focused platforms (iOS) to Android/Windows in order to develop for AR wearables.

They're playing in AR because they're looking for the new iPhone...a new form factor to deliver new applications and jump start sales. AR glasses could be that form factor if they can execute like Jobs did with the smartphone.

> Niantic, Blippar, Catchoom, Snapchat

Apple is doing very well for these applications, so again they're not behind.

> Enterprise/industrial...This market is very small currently

Exactly.

> AR developers will move away from mobile/tablet-focused platforms (iOS) to Android/Windows in order to develop for AR wearables.

Why are you so sure they will leave mobile? Wearables have three benefits: 1) hands-free, 2) immersive, 3) Stereo vision. None of those features have shown to be required for AR killer apps. So far the leading apps (Pokemon Go, SnapChat, etc) have not needed them. Do you have some reason to speculate that those specific benefits 1-3 will grow in importance?

Hands-on/non-immersive is actually a feature in some ways, it allows the user more control over their degree of immersion. And head mounted overlay AR requires a massive increase in processing power in order to get acceptable latency. Latency doesn't matter as much for handheld passthrough AR. Lots of tradeoffs there, it's not clear to me HMDs are a win for consumer applications. Industrial; sure.

Even in the industrial… I wonder.

We've seen some of the stuff Microsoft talks about with hololens. The idea that it could be useful to some people in industrial/business settings.

What if instead of needing a Hololens dev kit for $3k or waiting for a production version that will probably be at least $1k… you could get your application to work with the $350 iPad when the new OS comes out in September?

Sure Hololens Will be better at some things, but that's a hell of a price difference and it will be available retail soon. By the time your app is ready for your workers to use iOS 11 will probably be out.

| Probably using a lot of Metaio tech

Almost certainly - Metaio presented realtime lighting estimation at InsideAR (their dev conference) in late 2014. It's also been shown by Hans Kaufmann's research at TU Wien in Austria [1] although this has tighter links with other vendors than Metaio.

| Other vendors in the AR development solutions space include

I've had the pleasure of dealing with most of these folks within the last few years. They all have their own specialisms around certain tracking methodologies, pricing models and other features. Evaluate them with your own purposes in mind, and choose the right tool for the job.

| will have no play at the industrial/enterprise market if it limits its tools to development for the iOS family

In this market, Vuforia really does have it fairly cornered - it seems to be a chunk of what PTC are chasing, although they're far from turning a blind eye to B2C.

Edit: Grammar fail.

[1] https://www.ims.tuwien.ac.at/research/virtual-and-augmented-...

For AR, to win, you do not have to be the first one to market to win, its who can make the best platform for developers will win. As an AR developer, previous platforms like Vuforia, ARToolkit, and even Tango are either limiting or very hard to work with.

What? Vuforia is extremely easy to work with. Are you sure your difficulty issues weren't just Unity being a garbage heap of bad UI and poorly documented processes?

Lol, I mean building a native ios swift app with vuforia was a pain in the butt, since they have NO documentation on their code or any tutorials. Github link here: https://github.com/interactivetech/VuforiaScenekit

I have been avoiding building AR for Unity for the reasons you described xD!

If you can get someone to walk you through it a few times, point out the major parts, it's the easiest way I know of to get 3D apps up and running. And it's in very high demand.

The only problem is that I very much believe in the web application model as a means of reaching a wide audience with the fewest resources, but Unity's WebGL export is functionally useless.

That would of been great to have mentorship, but I ended up doing it the harder way, Struggling and reading code like a book. I learned a ton though, and its taken a while.I hope to soon provide people with tutorial/walkthrough with 3D apps.

You should take a look at AR.js, its a cool project that will hopefully provide that wider accessibility. The challenge with Apple's ARKit is that its AR technology( is much more challenging than Vuforia, and tricker to implement.

I've not worked with Vuforia, but I can confirm "Unity being a garbage heap of bad UI and poorly documented processes"

Other platforms don't limit you to just one operating system.

Indeed, but if Apple's SDK makes it way easier for developers to get onboard, then the rest of the market will then have something to aim at.

But this solution works on easy to get devices of which there are already hundreds of millions in the field.

It's not exactly a small market to address. Square has shown that you can get people to buy apple hardware for used in some specific capacity.

Just today PTC announced free trial access to their AR tools:

https://studio.thingworx.com/

Currently locking the AR to the real world requires a QR code-like mark but they are demoing AR with no mark. Not having a mark requires 3D data of something in the field of view:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S-4oJ8C_fo

skip to minute 19 to see the markless demo

Thingworx 8.0 will release, and Thingworx Studio will be upgraded. The new version of Thingworx studio can recognize the Thing Object by Thing shape just like demo video, not only by QR Code-like mark.

As you say, the Wingnut demo had nice content, but the whole experience looked unbelievably bad. Like, "original Wii ads with people jumping behind their couches" bad. If they showed it as a tech demo for integrating VFX in real time preview when shooting a movie I would have bought it 100%.

Do you know if Apple's new markerless AR tech automatically scales the digital object; or does the user resize the object to suit themselves?

The documentation says that it can do rough measurements and automatically scales things correctly. They pointed that out in the demo where the coffee cup was roughly the right size for a coffee cup instead of 5 feet tall or something like that.

There's also Sturfee which focuses on outdoor spaces which is a very hard problem for simple AR toolkits like this. Depth is hard and so most of these players cannot do outdoor AR. sturfee.com DISCLAIMER: I work at Sturfee and it's really great.