iOS 11 fulfills one of the great promises of the Apple company, bringing native support for augmented reality to the operating system for the first time. Apple presented its own application that demonstrates how useful augmented reality can be in iOS 11 on the iPhone or iPad, and now it is trying to convince the whole world to make applications based on it.
Together with iOS 11, Apple launched a platform called ARKit, which allows the use of iOS 11 APIs to implement augmented reality in applications. Apple says that iOS 11 will be the biggest platform for augmented reality and it is right, because hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads around the world will be able to run applications with ARKit implemented.
Although he did not say this at the presentation of iOS 11, in the page dedicated to the augmented reality system, the Apple company says that only some iPhones and iPads will be compatible with ARKit. More specifically, Apple claims that only its products that have A9 and A10 chips will be able to run applications with ARKit in iOS 11, so only products launched in 2015 and 2016 on the market.
All products released after iPhone 6S and up to iPhone 7, or all iPad Pro and iPad 2017 tablet models will be able to run applications that have ARKit implemented in iOS 11, but others will not. It was normal for Apple to limit ARKit compatibility from iOS 11 to a small number of iDevices, so if yours is not on the list, don't expect to use ARKit.
"ARKit runs on the Apple A9 and A10 processors. These processors deliver breakthrough performance that enables fast scene understanding and lets you build detailed and compelling virtual content on top of real-world scenes. You can take advantage of the optimizations for ARKit in Metal, SceneKit, and third-party tools like Unity and Unreal Engine.”
