This is nice but what's unique about this? Is it significantly better or more performant? Is it just nice to have an integrated solution?
I'd love to see a breakdown of ARKit vs something like Vuforia. Here's a video with the equivalent functionality to the WWDC demo -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvE_7filGsY
>This is nice but what's unique about this? Is it significantly better or more performant? Is it just nice to have an integrated solution?
Ignoring all that other stuff, it's officially sanctioned and supported, part of the platform, requires no external libs, has Cocoa level documentation, and tons of developers will be using it very soon.
It all depends on whether Apple makes ARKit a priority, though. Apple has advertised SpriteKit on various occasions, then mostly broke it in iOS 9.0/9.1 [1], [2]. Game Center went down once a single game (Letterpress) started using it as designed [3]. What will you do if ARKit breaks in iOS 12.0? If you use an third-party lib, at least you can roll back to an earlier version, or even fix the bug yourself if it is open source.
I would stay as far away from Apple as possible when it comes to gamedev tools.
> part of the platform, requires no external libs [...]
Sadly this also means Apple will only update it in subsequent versions of the OS. This is a big deal when choosing a target platform, e.g. ARKit 11 vs ARKit 12.
For example when iOS 12 comes out your target audience will be split, some with ARKit 11 and some with 12. You'll have to decide if you want the new features in 12 or ability to run on devices still using iOS 11.
Compare with other game platforms, which insulate you from underlying tech changes. For example a Unity app can be updated and use the latest Unity features, even on an old iOS.
[FWIW Apple could update ARKit independently of iOS, but that's not been their pattern]
The building destruction physics were pretty impressive. Maybe I'm out of touch with modern games engines but I've not seen anything quite like that before.
I'd love to see a breakdown of ARKit vs something like Vuforia. Here's a video with the equivalent functionality to the WWDC demo -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvE_7filGsY