Apple's vice president of product marketing Greg Joswiak this week sat down for an interview with The Australian, where he spoke about the company's augmented reality efforts, including ARKit and the response that its gotten from developers so far.
Enthusiasm about ARKit has been "unbelievable" says Joswiak, who went on to describe some of the things developers have built so far, including virtual tape measures that can accurately measure real-world objects. "It's absolutely incredible what people are doing in so little time," he said. Joswiak declined to speak about Apple's future AR plans, but said the company is going to "start at zero" with the iPhone and the iPad.
Apple was not talking about any plan to build AR glasses or a headset, but would instead promote its use on the iPhone and iPad, he said. "I think there is a gigantic runway that we have here with the iPhone and the iPad. The fact we have a billion of these devices out there is quite an opportunity for developers.
"Who knows the kind of things coming down the road, but whatever those things are, we're going to start at zero."
Joswiak also spoke about HomeKit, where he said he expects "plenty" of compatible HomeKit devices to be in homes in Australia before the HomePod speaker launches in December, and he highlighted both the new Siri voices in iOS 11 and Apple's work on machine learning. Apple has been using machine learning techniques since 2007, when the original iPhone launched. "We used machine learning to learn what you typed back in 2007," he said.
Machine learning, ARKit, and artificial intelligence play a major role in iOS 11. With ARKit, developers are able to quickly and easily build augmented reality experiences into their apps and games. When it launches this fall, ARKit will be the largest AR platform in the world, thanks to the myriad iPhones and iPads that are out on the market.
