The Lord of the Rings film director Peter Jackson is excited about augmented reality, so much so that he has created a new company in New Zealand dubbed Wingnut AR.
Alasdair Coull, head of Wingnut AR, showed a demo of what the company is working on at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, California.
The demo made use of Apple’s upcoming ARKit augmented reality developer kit, which will transform hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads into AR devices. In the demo, Coull showed a small town on top of a tabletop. You couldn’t see the town on top of the actual table. But viewed through the screen of the iPad, you could see the town in three dimensions.
Coull added people into the scene, and other objects that made it seem real. Then some sci-fi fighter jets flew overhead and started attacking the town, with high-end sound effects adding to the sense of combat.
The scene was built using Epic games Unreal Engine 4 game engine.