WWDC18: Book of the Dead debuts on MacBook Pro; ARKit 2 available for Unity devs

What an exciting WWDC18 keynote! Apple showcased some of the great new features coming with iOS 12, including significant updates to ARKit. Apple also showed how powerful the MacBook Pro paired with eGPU can be, enabling it to run interactive content like Unity’s Book of the Dead, in real-time.

With Metal support and external GPUs, Unity's editing and rendering environment drove the Book of the Dead’s hyperrealistic scene with incredible performance on a MacBook Pro. We ran the demo in real-time, using Unity’s HD scriptable render pipeline on the massive WWDC stage screen at a solid 30 FPS -- a real feat, and proof of performance for the MacBook and eGPU.

Apple also unveiled the amazing new features in ARKit 2, including immediate support for shared experiences, persistent AR, object recognition, and image tracking. These tools will be available to developers using Unity today, making the experiences you create more beautiful, seamless, interactive, and collaborative than ever before.

During the keynote, ARKit 2 was showcased using Lego Studio, demonstrating the new object recognition feature and interactivity between virtual objects and real environments. We’re proud that the Lego Studio showcase was made with Unity, using the Unity ARKit Plugin.  The tools used to unlock the power of ARKit 2 is now available to all Unity developers.

We are committed to making the most powerful and convenient tools for AR development. Look for more announcements from the XR Team in the near future as we continue to integrate AR technologies more tightly into our products and services and add functionality that makes AR development faster and easier.

Ensure you have Unity 2017.4 or higher to enable the ARKit 2 SDK for Unity. Here are a few resources to help you get started:

1. Download Unity 2017.4 or higher from Unity Downloads, and install iOS Support.
2. Download latest XCode 10.0 Beta
3. Get an iOS device that supports ARKit Framework
4. Download latest iOS 12.0 Beta from Apple Developer website, and install it on your device.
5. Download the Unity plugin for ARKit 2 Beta here and try out the example scenes that demonstrate these great new features.
6. Read up on how to use the new features from Unity here.

Join the Unity Connect Mobile AR channel and share what you’ve been working on. Handheld AR is still new and there’s lots of room to explore and build unique applications. We’ll be watching for the best ideas!