(2017-09-12) Why Augmented Reality Is About To Take Over Your World

Alex Kantrowitz: Why Augmented Reality Is About To Take Over Your World

Neon has a number of features that layer the digital world on top of the real one, including a friend locator that uses your phone’s camera display to place arrows above contacts within 100 meters. Before ARKit, Neon could only accurately locate your contacts if you stood still, so if you took a few steps, you’d need to refresh the app. With ARKit — which offers lighting-fast image processing and measurement capabilities that allow a phone to understand where it is in space — Neon gives you a consistently accurate read, so the app is actually useful now.

There’s only so many times you’ll be able to anchor a piece of furniture or a cartoon in the room before you get tired of that,” he said. “The leaders in AR are going to have to establish a level of persistence in order to move past the novelty.”