Building for iOS with ARKit

Although we made this project for Microsoft HoloLens devices, that certainly is not a requirement. In this section, we will adapt the project for mobile devices using the Apple ARKit.

As we now know, the HoloLens device includes a depth sensing camera that estimates the distance of each pixel in view and stitches together a mesh, or spatial map, of the environment. Similar technologies are also available in Google Tango and Intel RealSense. New smartphones are emerging with these sensors built in, and that will make it easier to implement projects such as this using mobile phone devices rather than the expensive HoloLens HMD.

Apple introduced ARKit for iOS 11 to solve this problem without the need for special depth-sensing hardware in the mobile device. It uses regular camera and AI software to scan the environment and infer depth information based on parallax and other spatial cues, and then track the device's movement using its built-in motion sensors.

For iOS...