Apple Unveils ARKit 3 with RealityKit and Reality Composer

Apple has used the last two WWDCs as an opportunity to showcase its latest and greatest augmented reality innovations, the ARKit and ARKit 2.0 software development kits for iOS, as well as annual hands-on demonstrations. This year, we're pleased to introduce new augmented reality initiatives, including ARKit 3, RealityKit, and Reality Composer, a set of tools designed to facilitate the development of AR.

ARKit 3 supports two main features: automatic real-time occlusion of people viewed by the host device camera, and real-time motion capture with the camera. Face tracking now supports up to three people at a time when viewed by TrueDepth front cameras on iPhone X / XR / XS devices and iPad Pro. Developers can simultaneously access face and world tracking on the front and back cameras. . Live collaboration sessions are supported between multiple people, using a shared world map.

RealityKit is a high-level infrastructure that allows developers to easily merge virtual objects with real-world environments, automatically adapt them to work properly on multiple Apple devices, and manage shared RA experience networking requests. . It supports photorealistic rendering, new environment and camera effects, as well as additional animation, physics, and audio effects. It integrates natively with ARKit and has a Swift API.

Reality Composer allows developers to create interactive scenes with full AR support and includes hundreds of virtual objects, with the ability to import and customize USDZ files. Virtual objects in scenes can be animated and made sensitive to taps, proximity, and other triggers. Developers will be able to use Reality Composer both in XCode and as an iOS app.

In addition, Mojang representatives came on stage to present Minecraft Earth, an augmented version of Minecraft at AR that looks a lot like the HoloLens demonstrations offered by Microsoft several years ago. It is actually Minecraft on a surface of your choice, such as a large table, with the possibility of interacting a little with people. It looks like Minecraft Earth is coming this summer, which would be ahead of the planned release date for ARKit 3, RealityKit and Reality Composer.