My Thoughts on ARKit

I genuinely thought AR was dead for a long time. When the Nintendo 3DS came out in 2011, I was most excited about AR Games, a collection of Nintendo-themed AR demos centered around physical cards. The technology became dormant and never really did anything until Pokémon Go last year, to which most people playing the game immediately turned the feature off. When Apple announced ARKit at WWDC this year, I genuinely thought they lost it. I thought AR was just a gimmick with no potential. I thought it was something you picked up once and stopped using (and that could potentially still be the case). But now that I've seen what so many developers can do with this technology, it could change our daily lives. Augmenting furniture into our rooms before buying it, using the camera as a ruler, augmented walking directions, and augmented models of food instead of regular menus. I'm not a big fan of games centered around AR, because they seem gimmicky. But nevertheless, the strong framework is there. If this technology is really as good as we've been seeing in not only Apple's demos, but also from developer's demos too, there's a whole new ballgame. I understand a lot of people are saying that they don't see the point or that the whole thing seems pointless. To that, all I can say is things like Snapchat and Twitch exists. If I told you fifteen years ago that I wanted a service that only displayed pictures sent to me for seven seconds, you'd say that would never catch on (I still don't get why Snapchat is so popular still). If I told you fifteen years ago that I wanted a website that would let me watch people play video games live, you'd say nobody would want to watch other people play video games. And here we are. Could it flop? Absolutely. But sometimes it takes some risks and a large community of developers to create something really amazing. It worked for the App Store, and it could work here too.