Apple AR: Move the AR World with Your Gestures in New Demo

The future is here with a new demo made with Apple's ARKit and LeapMotion.

Typically, since ARKit works through your iPhone, in order to move augmented reality objects that are appearing on your screen, you have to drag them with your finger. However, developer Arthur Schiller is now playing around with how you can move augmented reality objects on your phone with gesture recognition, rather than by touching.

He stresses in his tweet that right now, this demo is just a proof of concept that he hopes will develop into a way to use gesture recognition for ARKit without using a VR/AR headset. The video shows an iPhone 7 connected to a MacBook that's using LeapMotion. An AR box appears when Schiller opens ARKit on his phone and with the MacBook doing the processing and streaming the motion data to the iPhone, Schiller is able to manipulate the box with his hand gestures. Though the gestures have to be basic as of now, he is able to flip, move and rotate the box.

This concept is incredibly promising for the world of mobile AR. Even though right now you can only use gesture recognition technology with ARKit using your MacBook, Schiller's demo opens up the possibility that one day we'll be able to manipulate the mobile AR world using gestures and without a headset.