Augmented reality is coming in hot this year. Mostly, due to Apple giving us their ARKit. Because of the full support of this platform, augmented reality apps have blown up this year. Not just in quantity, but quality as well. If you haven’t had the opportunity to experience one for yourself, you’re definitely missing out. But don’t beat yourself up, instead, you can live vicariously through us by way of this post – where we will outline the best AR apps of the year.
Night Sky
This is a really cool app, especially if you’re a fan of stargazing or astronomy in any way. Augmented reality has improved that experience by letting you see constellations through your phone. Night Sky lets you easily identify constellations and stellar objects without taking your eye off the actual sky. The best part about this app is the Grand Orrery feature, which gives you a look at our solar system and surrounding stars from a different perspective. It allows you to walk around to better see where everything lines up in the solar system.
Mini Guns
One of the best things about augmented reality is the ability to turn an ordinary tabletop into a game. Maybe the best example of this is Mini Guns. Mini Guns is a simple strategy game with lots of variables. A really neat thing about this is the ability to zoom in and out, which also gives you an advantage during the game. Instead of pinching and zooming, the AR mode lets you physically lean into and away from the table you are playing on. It makes an already great game even more interactive.
Warby Parker
The folks at Warby Parker are the undisputed champions at making it easy for you to try out glasses before you buy them, and in the comfort of your own home no less. What could possibly be better than being able to put a couple pair of glasses on your face without going into the store? Never needing to wait for glasses to ship to you in the first place without knowing they’ll actually fit your face.
The Warby Parker app, through the use of AR, now allows you to be fitted for your glasses in a realistic way. Because who wants glasses that don’t fit? This gives you a genuine understanding of how these glasses will look on your face before you ever touch the frames yourself, solving one of the biggest challenges associated with shopping online. An important caveat to this app is that it only works with the iPhone X because the special camera sensors on the front of that iPhone makes scanning your face accurate enough to get your face measurements right.
Download the Warby Parker app for free now.
JigSpace
This is a 100% augmented reality app that does one thing very well. You can select anything out of a massive library of “jigs” and set that object in front of you. Using a step-by-step exploded view breakdown, JigSpace then shows you how that thing works. You can tap and see the inside of a door lock floating next to you on the couch, or walk around the outside of a life-sized trebuchet (think catapult), and each will offer you a thorough breakdown of what makes that thing function. It’s not only incredibly educational, the app itself is very well made. JigSpace is simple to use, and there’s a ton of fantastic “jigs” for you to explore.
Dubface
You don’t need fancy editing software to play around with images of people’s faces. Which is why the internet is filled with these kinds of pictures. Now you can have this kind experience using the app Dubface. The app takes a 3D selfie and lets you stick it on a bunch of sill animated bodies that will wander around the real world and do things worthy of thousands of photos. This might be the best party app ever because you can store many different faces though Dubface and use them to create epic or hilariously embarrassing scenes for everyone to enjoy.