News: This iPhone App Gives You Virtual Prizes for Turning Your Curse Words into Objects in AR

If you love to hear yourself talk, you can now enjoy seeing your words materialize in augmented reality with an ARKit-compatible iPhone or iPad.

A new app called Word Vomit 3D uses the speech recognition API of iOS to take in what the user says and regurgitate it into the real world as three-dimensional text.

There's not a lot to the game in terms of functionality or goals, but it does award virtual trophies for hitting certain word streak milestones, such as 50 and 100 words. Users can also earn virtual toys (arriving in those little plastic balls that come out of vending machines) when uttering certain words, such as cat and...uhh...the more vulgar word for the poo emoji.

And although it's an iOS app, there's a special treat waiting for users who utter the word "android." A fan of SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk? Say his name and out pops an augmented reality space ship. Yes, really.

Unlike some apps that provide a native screen recording option built into the app (like Lego AR Studio, IKEA Place, and others), in this case, to record your own word flow you need to use the screen recording function in iOS 11.

Word Vomit is the latest in a line of ARKit apps that demonstrate ingenuity in experimenting with the new platform, but serve little practical purpose other than to show off what's possible for mobile AR. In some ways, we're still in the "single gimmicky feature as an entire app" phase of AR (a familiar cycle for new innovations in tech). For example, the app's single-focus functionality seems like something that the development team behind Music.ly would do well to issue in an update.

Similarly, AR Lyrics could have easily been implemented in Shazam, if the company wasn't already busy being acquired by Apple. And, since we really didn't need another digital whoopie cushion, fARtjacker could have just been an update to iFart.

Of course, ARKit is still in its infancy. It wasn't too long ago that the App Store itself was a new thing and developers were just getting their feet wet with what they could do with mobile apps and touchscreens. In the same sense, it will take a little more time for ARKit features to make their way into apps that are truly useful or have some kind of stickiness. In the meantime, we can still enjoy the ongoing AR fun being regularly rolled out from the App Store.

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