Apple's ARKit Opens Doors for Creative Industry
Industry insiders comment on Apple's iPhone X release this week & what implications its ARKit carries for brands.
It was the week that Apple launched the X; the £999 (& $999) phone to mark a decade since the brand unveiled its first handset.
The model boasts a range of features (rightly so too, to justify that pricetag...) such as a glass exterior, surgical stainless steel edges and water-resistant surface. Although the most impressive feature is probably its ARKit inbuilt facial recognition technology that allows users to unlock phones using only their faces (although the function proved unsuccessful during the live on-stage demo). Known as Face ID, X users can also purchase items via Apple Pay and bring emojis to life with the animoji feature.
So what does this mean for advertisers and creatives? We caught up with our industry's tech experts to get their take on the latest Apple update.
Jason Prohaska, Managing Director, MediaMonks NYC
The benefits of Augmented Reality go well beyond advertising and marketing. We will see AR solve challenges in the customer service arena and take training programs into new territory. For tasks like learning about or fixing complex machinery, augmenting the real world with digital objects is becoming a new gold standard very quickly.
Augmented reality significantly changes the playing field when it comes to training and education. Christmas and Birthday have come all at once for programs like customer service, maintenance and employee education. Adding digital layers to these areas that can be seen by the masses will help bring AR past advertising and marketing, into practical domains for employees and customers alike.
Sol Rogers, CEO & Founder, REWIND
The accessibility and simplicity of markerless AR are two of the huge advantages it has over VR, and now Apple has opened it up to the masses with ARKit, offering endless potential for brands. It can be used to allow consumers to interact with products before they buy or show how, for example, a sofa will look in their living room or a car on their drive. It can be used to decorate a space or visualise a restaurant menu, add player stats to a football game or even unlock prizes.
AR offers the latest way to engage with audiences on mass and will further blur the line on what an advertisement is. But brands keen to get involved need to be relevant, useful and/or entertaining to succeed. AR shouldn't just be used as a gimmick; it should be used to help drive affinity by making everyday life that little bit easier or purely bringing a bit of magic into our world.
Christopher Marsh, Director of Technology, AKQA San Fran
Apple’s new ARKit technology will allow brands to easily provide higher fidelity, mixed reality experiences with less effort than ever before. Brands with physical consumer products will be able to offer ownership previews (what will this car look like in my drive? What will this artwork look like on my wall?).
Mobile activations will now be able to incorporate the user’s physical environment with no need for fiducial markers - game characters emerging from walls, vehicles racing round tabletops, etc. The TrueDepth camera and facial tracking will provide the ability to map digital effects to a user’s face in real-time. So brands will be able to provide much more realistic selfie effects, in addition to more sophisticated configurator and preview options for products such as makeup and glasses. An anti-smoking campaign might show the aging effects of cigarettes, a sunblock campaign might show the potential effect of sustained exposure to harmful UV rays, or a video game campaign might transform the user into a game character.
Membership
