{"id":36643,"date":"2022-06-04T17:35:41","date_gmt":"2022-06-04T17:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/for-apple-wwdc-2022-is-all-about-augmented-reality\/"},"modified":"2022-06-04T17:35:41","modified_gmt":"2022-06-04T17:35:41","slug":"for-apple-wwdc-2022-is-all-about-augmented-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/for-apple-wwdc-2022-is-all-about-augmented-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"For Apple, WWDC 2022 is all about augmented reality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Apple’s software is very good, generally speaking. Even as the company has spread its focus among more platforms than ever – macOS and iOS and iPadOS and tvOS and watchOS and whatever software Apple’s building for its maybe-possibly-coming-someday car and its almost-certainly-coming-soon AR \/ VR headset – those platforms have continued to be excellent. It’s been a while since we got an Apple Maps-style fiasco; the biggest mistakes Apple makes now are much more on the level of putting the Safari URL bar on the wrong part of the screen.<\/p>\n

What all that success and maturity breeds, though, is a sense that Apple’s software is\u2026 finished – or at least very close. Over the last couple of years, the company’s software announcements at WWDC have been almost exclusively iterative and additive, with few big swings. Last year’s big iOS announcements, for instance, were some quality-of-life improvements to FaceTime and some new kinds of ID that work in Apple Wallet. Otherwise, Apple mostly just rolled out new settings menus: new controls for notifications, Focus mode settings, privacy tools – that sort of thing.<\/p>\n

This is not a bad thing! Neither is the fact that Apple is the best fast-follower in the software business, remarkably quick to adapt and polish everybody else’s new ideas about software. Apple’s devices are as feature-filled, long-lasting, stable, and usable as anything you’ll find anywhere. Too many companies try to reinvent everything all the time for no reason and end up creating problems where they didn’t exist. Apple is nothing if not a ruthlessly efficient machine, and that machine is hard at work honing every pixel its devices create.<\/p>\n

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The best of iOS 15, in case you forgot.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

But we’re at an inflection point in technology that will demand more from Apple. It’s now fairly clear that AR and VR are Apple’s next big thing, the next supposedly earth-shakingly huge industry after the smartphone. Apple’s not likely to show off a headset at WWDC, but as augmented and virtual reality come to more of our lives, everything about how we experience and interact with technology is going to have to change. <\/p>\n

Apple has been showing off AR for years, of course. But all it’s shown are demos, things you can see or do on the other side of the camera. We’ve seen very little from the company about how it thinks AR devices are going to work and how we’re going to use them. The company that loves raving about its input devices is going to need a few new ones and a new software paradigm to match. That’s what we’re going to see this year at WWDC.<\/p>\n

Remember last year, when Apple showed that you could take a picture of a piece of paper with your iPhone and it would automatically scan and recognize any text on the page? Live Text is an AR feature through and through: it’s a way of using your phone’s camera and AI to understand and catalog information in the real world. The whole tech industry thinks that’s the future – that’s what Google’s doing with Maps and Lens and what Snapchat is doing with its lenses and filters. Apple needs a lot more where Live Text came from.<\/p>\n

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Live Text is an AR feature through and through.<\/em><\/figcaption>Image: Apple<\/cite><\/p>\n

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From a simple UI perspective, one thing AR will require is a much more efficient system for getting information and accomplishing tasks. Nobody’s going to wear AR glasses that send them Apple Music ads and news notifications every six minutes, right? And full-screen apps that demand your singular attention are increasingly going to be a way of the past.<\/p>\n

We may get some hints about what that will look like: it sounds like \u201cuse your phone without getting lost in your phone\u201d is going to be a theme at this year’s WWDC. According to Bloomberg<\/em>‘s Mark Gurman, we could see an iOS lock screen that shows useful information without requiring you to unlock your phone. A more glanceable iPhone seems like an excellent idea and a good way to keep people from opening their phone to check the weather only to find themselves deep down a TikTok hole three and a half hours later. Same goes for the rumored \u201cinteractive widgets,\u201d which would let you do basic tasks without having to open an app. And, if Focus mode gets some rumored enhancements – and especially if Apple can make Focus mode easier to set up and use – it could be a really useful tool on your phone and a totally essential one on your AR glasses.<\/p>\n

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