Wayne Ma: ‘Apple Devising Software to Help Anyone Build AR Apps’ Using Siri, Not Code

Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information (MacRumors summary):

Apple is developing software to make it easy for users of its upcoming mixed-reality headset to build their own augmented reality apps, according to four people who have worked on the headset.

With the software tools, Apple hopes that even people who don’t know computer code could tell the headset, via the Siri voice assistant, to build an AR app that could then be made available via Apple’s App Store for others to download. The tool, for example, could allow users to build an app with virtual animals moving around a room and over or around real-life objects without the need to design the animal from scratch and calculate its movement in a 3D space with obstacles.

Ma says “apps”, and if they’d go in the App Store I guess they’d be apps, but what he describes sounds more like AR content than AR apps.

Some former Apple engineers have likened Apple’s content creation tool to the popular games “Minecraft” and “Roblox,” which make it easy for children to build their own 3D worlds and objects with simple interfaces.

Minecraft and Roblox are for children, LOL.

The current status of Apple’s app development tool couldn’t be learned. But some people familiar with it had seen demonstrations as recently as 2021.

Four people saw this tool over a year ago, and it’s news? Says me, the guy linking to it — but it’s such a cool idea to have an AR content creation tool right there in the AR headset environment. I think Ma is missing a lot of information about Reality Composer (or whatever the tool is going to be named), but establishing the platform as something for creation out of the box is exciting. (It took over a decade to be able to create iPad software on an iPad with Swift Playgrounds.)

★ Friday, 27 January 2023