We are back from WWDC, the annual Apple developer conference, where Apple made two very cool announcements: they are finally officially entering VR, in collaboration with HTC Vive. And they are also entering Augmented Reality (AR), with ARKit, a software development kit (SDK) to develop AR applications for iOS, available with iOS11 coming in September.
We already have the VR part covered, through our work with WebVR, and it’s already running on the new Macs with Firefox.
As for the AR part, we started geeking around ARkit, and we already have a proof of concept working through a webview in a native app! Here is a quick video demo:
This means two things:
- You will be able to very easily publish AR content on iOS with Sketchfab – no dev skills required, no need to develop your own app!
- You will be able to browse more than 1.5 million things in AR through Sketchfab.
This is a big step for AR, as iOS is a very popular mobile platform, and because ARKit offers good AR support out of the box, without requiring specific additional hardware.
And if you are a developer working on an AR app but don’t have 3D content, we can help! Here are more than 100k 3D models available for free download under a Creative Commons license.
We’ll keep you posted on our progress!
About the author
Alban Denoyel
Co-founder and CEO of Sketchfab.
When can mobile (Android) be able to see AR?
We are working on this as well, take a look at https://blog.sketchfab.com/sketchfab-back-google-io-2017-standalone-vr-webar-news/
Fab stuff! And I agree with Masami MOri too also as an Android user… I would love to be able to experiment with overlays of my historical building reconstructions on top of their real-world locations!
Is there trial access to the AR? This is awesome.
Unfortunately not yet, but hopefully soon!
Is ARKit native to the phone OS? Or does it require particular apps for use? Perhaps the former is coming in the next phone. Great write-up. I’m looking forward to your app updates 🙌
Thanks! Yes, this is native to the phone OS, and it’s already available in iOS11 beta, which will be released in September.
wow
So pleased you are underway with this. Will it be both marker and markerless?
Markerless for now, but we’ll look into it.
This is really impressive and very very cool! I like the way you are thinking!
Thanks Fabian!
guys, can you post that video on YouTube? I wanted to give thumbs up (+1).
Here you go 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZOsAm_RsQs&feature=youtu.be
This is really cool… I can’t wait to test it with some of our body scans!
This is really awesome! I currently use the free version of Sketchfab and it has been a
while since my last upload, but I am interested in finding out more about this AR
platform. I’m not a web person, but a 3D animator and I don’t even have a cell phone, so I don’t know how to set up apps for phones. I would like to delve into it in the future, though.
So very cool! Will baked animations run during AR? There is so much potential to this!
Yes! It will work with every Sketchfab upload, so most Sketchfab features will work with ARKit, including animation, PBR…
That is so cool! If we wanted to get involved with animation in SketchFab now, are there any references we can explore?
This is great, this would help us to show our items in AR using the same app we already have.
I have ARKit on my phone with the beta of iOS 11 – How do you upload the additional 3D content to be used by the ARKit app? Or do you have a separate app that makes a call to the ARKit procedures? This is very interesting.
Yes you’ll need the Sketchfab mobile app to be able to use it. Coming soon, stay tuned 🙂