Apple’s ARKit already has many of
the fundamentals in place to help developers create augmented reality
experiences. This year’s release of ARKit 3 added RealityKit and Reality
Composer tools focused on easing the process of adding virtual objects and
environments to real world spaces. Now it appears that Apple’s next step could
be virtual people. Until last month, U.K.-based iKinema was focused on
providing 3D motion animation tools to movie and game developers, enabling
virtual characters to exhibit highly believable body movements. The company’s
flagship RunTime software enables easy but realistic kinematic simulations of
the entire human body, including locomotion and other procedural animations,
openly winning deals with Google, Microsoft, and numerous game studios.
Following legal filings in the
U.K. that showed an Apple attorney becoming an iKinema director in
mid-September, and a subsequent change of address to the same location as Apple
Europe, Apple confirmed today to The Financial Times that it has acquired
iKinema, the company famously doesn’t confirm specifics about most of its
smaller technology company purchases. Since the purchase wouldn’t make sense as
a way to keep supplying various Apple competitors with kinematic tools, there
has to be another motivation. Bringing realistic human motion to ARKit and a
wide variety of Apple AR-capable platforms makes the most sense, and there’s a
particularly interesting set of AR applications that Apple could target: AR
avatars.