Apple Finally Announces AR and VR Integrations

    The rundown of the new Apple AR and VR integrations you need to know about are right here!

    By
    Michael De Medeiros
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    Well, we’ve all been waiting for it and it finally came: Apple has made some official moves within the virtual and augmented reality segments at their keynote for WWDC 2017. It was a great surprise to see the power of the new VR ready 27-inch iMac on stage with an HTC Vive and some Star Wars action, but before you go around thinking that the game has totally changed, you need to know the entire run down of what Apple is doing. Here’s everything you need to know!

    iOS 11

    Apple previewed iOS 11 at WWDC, which is a major update bringing new experiences and hundreds of features to iPhone and iPad this fall. iOS 11 is the biggest software release ever for iPad, with powerful multitasking features, the Files app and more ways to use Apple Pencil. But the big news is the AR integrations!

    Augmented reality is coming to hundreds of millions of iOS devices with a new platform for developers to build apps that let users place virtual content on top of real-world scenes. CoreML gives developers on-device machine learning capabilities so they can easily make apps that will predict, learn and become more intelligent. iOS 11 is available as a developer preview today and will be a free software update for iPhone and iPad this fall.

    According to Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering:

    “With iOS 11, we’re delivering the biggest AR platform in the world, and it’s available today for developers to begin building AR experiences using ARKit for hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users.”

    iMac Pro

    Apple also gave a sneak peek of the new iMac Pro, including an entirely new workstation-class product line designed for pro users with the most demanding workflows. The all-new iMac Pro features a 27-inch Retina 5K display, up to 18-core Xeon processors and up to 22 Teraflops of graphics computation, making it the most powerful Mac ever made. This new iMac Pro packs incredible performance for advanced graphics editing, virtual reality content creation and real-time 3D rendering and is scheduled to ship in December starting at $4,999 (US).
    iMac Pro comes with the new Radeon Pro Vega GPU, the most advanced graphics ever in a Mac. Featuring a new next-generation compute core and up to 16GB of on-package high-bandwidth memory (HBM2), iMac Pro with the Vega GPU delivers up to an amazing 11 Teraflops of single-precision compute power for real-time 3D rendering and immersive, high frame rate VR. And for half-precision computation, ideal for machine learning, iMac Pro delivers up to an incredible 22 Teraflops of performance.

    iMac receives major update

    Apple today updated its iMac line with up to three times more powerful graphics, faster processors, Thunderbolt 3, faster storage options and brighter Retina displays, and added a Retina 4K display and discrete graphics to the $1,299 (US) 21.5-inch iMac. With its incredibly thin and seamless enclosure, fast processors and storage and stunning Retina display, iMac sets the gold standard for desktops. iMac delivers powerful performance for 3D graphics, video editing and gaming, and with macOS High Sierra coming this fall, iMac becomes a great platform for virtual reality content creation. Apple also today updated MacBook and MacBook Pro with faster processors, added faster SSDs to MacBook and introduced a new $1,299 (US) 13-inch MacBook Pro.

    What does this mean for Fitness?

    Right now, there’s little known about how this will impact on your next workout, but it’s obvious that Apple is targeting fitness even harder than ever before with more Apple watch integrations. The key here is that with Apple finally making moves in this segment, it’s obvious that massive change is coming to your workout through your phone, tablet and integrating with current and future headsets for VR and AR. We’ll continue to follow this news and any further developments as they happen and report them here! Stay tuned!

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