Greg Joswiak, the vice-president of product marketing at Apple, announced the brilliant reaction the company has received to augmented reality. The announcement came in an interview with The Australian earlier this week. The vice-president called the reaction “unbelievable” and suggested augmented reality is moving at a rapid pace.
What does this mean for the iPhone?
This all suggests that when iOS 11 is released alongside the iPhone 8 in the fall, the App Store could be offering even more augmented reality apps that we imagined. Joswiak outlined some of the features that will be available:
“They’ve built everything from virtual tape measures (to) ballerinas made out of wood dancing on floors. It’s absolutely incredible what people are doing in so little time.”
The virtual tape measures will actually be able to measure real life objects. A video demonstrating these virtual tape measures was released this week and went viral on Twitter.
Joswiak addresses rumors
Joswiak went onto end rumors that Apple are creating AR glasses or a headset and said the company is instead focusing on its uses on the iPhone and iPad. Augmented reality will be particularly useful for shopping, education and training. Ikea, for example, is developing an app to allow shoppers to see how a piece of furniture will look in their own home.
Joswiak even went on to talk about the HomePod speaker. He said users would now have to option of a male or female voice when using Siri. Apple is also further developing machine learning for all its devices. He commented:
“We’ve been implementing machine learning in our products long before it was fashionable to call it machine learning.”
He suggested they used it in their original iPhone, learning how each user typed and modifying the hit zones of each letter accordingly.
These exciting new developments for Apple are coming to users on the tenth anniversary of the iPhone.