Awesome ARKit demo magics up an iMac out of thin air

By

iMac Apple
Imagine having an iMac wherever you needed one.
Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

Try as people might, moving an entire iMac around with you is never going to be easy. But what if all you had to do was to take the keyboard and mouse, and everything else would automatically follow?

That’s the vision of a nifty AR creation made by WWDC Scholar and Georgia Tech student Nicholas Grana. Check it out.

“iMac in AR!” Grana writes. “Just scan a keyboard and interact with an iMac as if it is really there.” He says that the demo was achieved after a few hours of playing around with ARKit.

While he simply refers to it as a “really cool prototype,” it would be interesting to see Grana (or someone else) pick up the idea and run with it. “Maybe desktops can be replaced by AR?” he ponders.

I think it’s unlikely that that will happen imminently, but it’s definitely a neat idea. After all, Apple doesn’t seem to be gearing up to build a touch-screen Mac any time soon. As a result, there’s no real reason a Mac must be physically there to be used. An approach like this would let users quickly change the size of their Mac display — or even its orientation — if they needed to.

You’d need a better way of accessing AR than by holding up your iPhone to see it. But that’s what Apple’s AR Glasses project could be all about.

What do you think of this futuristic demo? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.