In reply to Chuck.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about AR Kit a lot this week because I’m one of the millions whose most interaction with it was turning it on once in Pokemon Go, deciding it was neat but not worth the battery cost and turning it back off.

After Microsoft announced the HoloLens they announced that new phone handsets would have a bunch of 3D scanning tools from then on, which mostly didn’t come to fruition because that was already the death spiral of Windows Phone.

It’s very interesting to look at how quiet but capable AR Kit is and with the hindsight from Vision Pro start to project backwards. From that perspective Apple may have been following Microsoft’s exact same playbook on the exact same timeline, but just quietly executed it so much better. Including that they also learned from Microsoft’s Kinect playbook that Microsoft themselves maybe forgot worked so well. Apple sold AR Kit as a “silly” feature for fad games like Pokemon Go and “maybe some cool Map stuff”. They sold adding tons of sensors and extra cameras and lenses in the iPhones on quality “nice-to-have” photography and also maybe those silly AR Kit games. They packed an extraordinary AR sensor kit into lots of people’s everyday pockets (and in the process smartly leveraged economies of scale to drastically bring down the prices on a lot of it) and barely tipped their hand how serious they felt about AR and sold it all mostly on short term silly/fun/nice-to-have.

It’s fascinating. I have a lot of questions and curiosities. I still think Apple has a few more cards sleeved.