Apple Announces ARKit 4 with Location Anchors, Depth API, and Improved Face Tracking

Monday June 22, 2020 4:00 pm PDT by Hartley Charlton

Apple today announced ARKit 4 alongside iOS 14 and iPadOS 14. The new version of ARKit introduces Location Anchors, a new Depth API, and improved face tracking.

ARKit 4
Location Anchors allow developers to place AR experiences, such as life‑size art installations or navigational directions, at a fixed destination. Location Anchoring leverages the higher-resolution data in Apple Maps to place AR experiences at a particular point in the world, meaning AR experiences may now be placed at specific locations, such as throughout cities or alongside famous landmarks. Users can move around virtual objects and observe them from different perspectives, exactly as real objects are seen through a camera lens.

ARKit 4 also takes advantage of iPad Pro's LiDAR Scanner with a brand-new Depth API with advanced scene understanding capabilities, creating a new way to access detailed per-pixel depth information. When combined with 3D mesh data, this depth information makes virtual object occlusion more realistic by enabling instant placement of virtual objects within their physical surroundings. This can offer new capabilities for developers, such as taking more precise measurements and applying effects to the environment.

Finally, face tracking is expanded in ARKit 4 to support the front-facing camera on all devices with the A12 Bionic chip or newer. Up to three faces may now be tracked at once using the TrueDepth camera to power front-facing camera experiences like Memoji and Snapchat.

Tag: ARKit

Top Rated Comments

Nicky G

45 months ago

It's funny that this "small" piece of WWDC news will go down, I reckon, as some of the most revolutionary stuff Apple announced this year, well beyond switching to ARM. It will take a few more years before it becomes more obvious, but when the "AR kit" that "ARKit" was designed for from the get-go eventually drops, it is going to have some very well-fleshed-out tech baked into it, stuff Apple has been "testing" out in the open for years now. Both via ARKit, and lots of other little things, such as Ultrawideband, early embrace of bluetooth beacon technology, etc. Science fiction has been describing this stuff (in terms of "fully-realized AR") since at least as far back as the early 90s, in Snow Crash. We're getting very close!

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