Chapter 4
Sharing Augmented Reality

As kids, we used to have scavenger hunts. One team gets a head start and draws arrow hints on the ground. The second team then finds the first team by following the arrows. Sometimes the arrows point in two directions, so the second team has to try both directions to find the correct one.

Today, kids hunt Pokemon in Pokemon Go. The Pokemon in the mobile game are attached to a real-world location. When the players arrive at that location, they can catch the Pokemon with their mobile device.

Pokemon Go is like the scavenger hunts we used to have back in the day, but the focus is more on the Pokemon than on the teams hunting each other. Let’s try to combine aspects of Pokemon Go with the scavenger hunts we had before mobile devices came along. In this chapter we’ll create an app that lets a player draw text on the ground using ARKit. Another player will then be able to find the drawn text using only the app.

This might not sound like anything special, but under the hood, it’s quite cool. ARKit creates a map of the surroundings where the player adds the text. When another player uses an iPhone to scan the ground again, ARKit recognizes that it already has mapped this location and shows the text from the first player.

With these features of ARKit, you can build collaborative augmented reality apps. Two or more people can share the same augmented reality using different devices.

For this app we’ll use a storyboard for the user interface.

Let the hunting begin.