[paul9290]

I thought we might be seeing an AR app built into the Camera or Map app.

Nope just a kit for developers to build games only or does the ARkit allow access to the camera app? I'm dying to see innovation from Apple like in the camera app when you open it there's an option to view how things look in the past(100 years ago what did this spot in New York City look like.. where you can take a pic of yourself in the past).

I'm sure there's oodles that can be done with an AR Camera.

Apple and the others to me seem to be slow to innovate.

[basisword]

I might be wrong but it sounds like 3rd party devs can build those things using ARKit.

[aylmao]

Yeah, and that's the whole point of it. There's too many applications of AR for Apple to build alone.

[paul9290]

Hmmm but their actual camera app?

What will happen is a developer will build the app I mentioned above (could exist already) and then Apple will later build it into the camera app. I've never seen an app maker build functionality into any of the iPhone built in apps.

[Someone]

Look harder. iOS supports custom keyboards and app extensions that extend iMessage (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/messages)

[gbanfalvi]

I don't think Apple offers support to extend their camera app (there is support for extending the photos app, however).

What you _can_ do, (and it's quite easy), is to create your own app, capturing video from the camera. Then you can overlay any AR content you wish onto it.

[paul9290]

Yeah that's what I was saying.

[Someone]

Even ignoring that you'll need multiple photos to do the 3D reconstruction you need for augmented reality, that 100 year old photos may be lacking in resolution, and giving a few decades of leeway either way for that "100 years ago" I doubt even Google has enough data to have a reasonable chance of having a photo for random locations you might point your camera at.

[paul9290]

Does not have to be exact and a real photo from that time in that spot or a tad far away and or an arial shot can be used to create renderings.

[mendeza]

I think this is a good thing they are not baking AR into the camera like Facebook is doing with the Camera Effects Platform.

This allows developers to invent future "camera" apps that could be better to use than the regular camera.

[eridius]

AR requires camera access, but I'm rather confused as to why you think it would be integrated with the built-in Camera app. How would that work?

[paul9290]

Open the camera app and at the bottom click AR... an overlay appears with options like..

- Time Machine(idea noted above)

- Daylight View (if currently nighttime)

- and other AR apps devs or Apple creates.

[eridius]

Apple's Extensions operate over IPC. Trying to add overlays onto a live camera over IPC would probably introduce unacceptable lag. Especially if you also need to handle touch events too. And of course you wouldn't be able to actually do much besides have an overlay, e.g. transitioning to other screens, showing other UI controls etc. Plus this would significantly complicate the already-complicated Camera app interface.

And what would be the point? You can just launch a 3rd party AR app and it will use the camera APIs to show you the live camera feed, exactly like the built-in Camera app does.

[huangc10]

How does AR work without integration with the camera? They showed a demo of dev AR camera view where the camera identified "surface".