Apple AR: Our World Meets Minecraft's with AR Scanner

This is one of the coolest applications of Apple's ARKit that we've seen so far. The 3D software product studio gradientspace has created a Minecraft 3D scanner using ARKit.

The scanner lets you Minecraft your real world. While it's unclear exactly how the application works, in the video, the scanner starts by slowly moving over a garden of flowers. The flowers then begin to turn into blocks, little by little, as the user continuously passes the scanner over them. By the end of the video, all of the flowers have turned into small blocks, making it look like it would if you had a garden in a Minecraft game.

While we have seen Minecraft in augmented reality before, we've never seen it like this. Other applications have allowed you to project pre-made Minecraft blocks into your world to build, but none have let you turn your world into Minecraft blocks.

Creator Ryan Schmidt revealed his plans for the future of this application:

I am planning to continue developing this ARKit scanning capability for future apps. Gradientspace builds interactive 3D design tools, so the capabilities ARKit provides to design 'in the real world' are very exciting. However, to make more really awesome experiences, we need to bring as much of the real world into the virtual world as possible, so that the real-world objects can occlude the virtual objects, cast shadows, etc. Once we have the real world captured we can also use it to do things like help with positioning objects and so on. The Minecraft-style 3D shape capture is just the first set of ARKit-based 3D capture tools I am developing.

— Ryan Schmidt, gradientspace creator