Peter Jackson teams up with Apple to create augmented reality experiences

Renowned Kiwi filmmaker Peter Jackson is expanding his creative vision into the world of AR.

Jackson's Wellington company, WingNut Film Productions revealed the first taste of what they have been working on at Apple's AR conference in California.

Jackson and co-founder Fran Walsh formed the WingNutAR division 12 months ago and have hard at work creating content for the cutting edge form of digital technology.

Jackson saying, "Augmented reality allows story-tellers to generate digital creations that appear in the real world.

"I'm very excited about the endless creative potential of this new technology.

Jackson has teamed up with Apple in order to realise this vision.

WingNutAR has been making extensive use of the Apple ARKit for iOS 11.

ARKit uses Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) to accurately track the world around it.

VIO fuses camera sensor data with CoreMotion data.

These two inputs allow the device to sense how it moves within a room with a high degree of accuracy, and without any additional calibration.

With ARKit, iPhones and iPads can analyse the scene presented by the camera view and find horizontal planes in the room.

ARKit can detect horizontal planes like tables and floors, and can track and place objects on smaller feature points as well.

It also makes use of the camera sensor to estimate the total amount of light available in a scene and applies the correct amount of lighting to virtual objects.

It runs on the 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.

Users can take advantage of the optimizations for ARKit in Metal, SceneKit, and third-party tools like Unity and Unreal Engine.

Many developers have been using the ARKit to create epic prototype content, WingNutAR's creation is no different.

AR opens the door to epic stories that unfold within our everyday spaces, changing a mundane office into the scene for an epic battle.

Jackson's team created a short story about a remote outpost that plays out in stunning 3D.

You can watch the short reveal clip here: