One of the key features of iOS 11, which Apple announced earlier this week, is augmented reality. But Apple’s ho-hum demo during the event — a tabletop game, similar to what we’ve seen from other AR projects like Google’s Tango — still left a lot of us wondering how iOS developers would use AR once they got their hands on the tool that powers it. Thankfully, they’re already sharing their first results, and many of them are wonderfully weird.
Bar charts
Meetings will never be boring again!
Tilt Brush-style painting
For when you want to vandalize without all the messy consequences.
Real-time world filters
Want to pretend you’re living in an anime world but don’t have 100 hours to dump into Persona 5? Here you go:
Virtual pets
No fuss, no muss, no need to come to terms with death!
Terrifying games
Nothing says “persistent gaming” like having digital baddies chase you around the real world.
BB-8!
BB-8! BB-8! BB — you get the picture.
Showing off a 3D map of your bike ride
Because bragging to your friends about it on Instagram Stories clearly isn’t enough.
Space cats!
Honestly I don’t know what else to tell you.
The floor is lava water!
How else do you expect me to personally reenact the naval battles of the War of 1812? Buy a bunch of real boats?
Fidget spinners
Listen, it’s not a fad unless it shows up everywhere.
None of these are particularly revolutionary, though some of them (like this) do show that Apple’s approach to tracking could actually work pretty well. Phone-based AR has been growing in fits and starts for the last few years, and Snapchat (and, of course, Instagram and Facebook) has sort of been bringing it to the masses with filters for your face and the world around you.
But the idea that, by this fall, augmented reality could be spread to the billion devices running iOS means we could be facing a huge turning point for the technology. What looks like a weird idea this week could wind up being the next Pokémon Go this fall.
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