Step into the offices of Montreal-based 5th Wall Agency, and you can be transported through an interdimensional portal into a virtual world where you can see 360-degree views of a soccer match.
The mind-blowing video that the agency released last week shows how someone can look through a window into another world to get a glimpse of the action between Portuguese football clubs Porto and Benfica, and then also walk through the portal and right into Estádio do Dragão while looking back out toward the real world.
The video showcases the power of augmented reality, and it’s made possible by ARKit, Apple’s new framework on iOS 11 beta that allows the creation of augmented reality experiences for iPhone and iPad and has developers excitedly posting their creations on social media.
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ARKit, which was unveiled last month at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, uses what it calls Visual Inertial Odometry to track the world around it, fusing data to allow the device to sense how it moves within a room with a high degree of accuracy. Apple CEO Tim Cook had previously expressed his excitement about AR.
5th Wall Agency CEO and co-founder Ricardo Poupada wrote in the video description that among the demos the VR/AR agency was doing, the football match “is a favorite demo,” and that’s understandable. Providing a virtual door into a world of sports, after all, can have that effect.