THE AR REVOLUTION will come not with a bang but a tape measure. At least, that seems to be the lesson so far from ARKit, Apple’s new augmented-reality platform.
ARKit lets developers build AR apps, which integrate digital experiences into the physical world via iPhone or iPad, a la Pokémon Go. Those apps will be available to consumers when iOS 11 arrives in September. But developers have started tinkering—creating tools that let you see how furniture fits in a room or quickly calculate the area of your kitchen. Compared to the likes of Magic Leap or Google Glass, these apps are simple, almost trivial. But that smallness might be precisely what makes them so potentially huge.