Last week, Apple invited developers to their annual WWDC conference, to unveil everything new across all of their platforms. The past few years at WWDC, Augmented Reality has been a star of the show, with the presence of an “AR demo table” on-stage signalling new updates.

This year, the AR announcements seemed more incremental and muted, coming toward the end of a long presentation. I asked a few developer friends (outside of AR circles) their impressions of what was announced. “People occlusion? There was an awkward Minecraft demo.”

After watching the keynote, I had a similar impression. But then I started digging into the documentation the next day, and I realised that the changes are actually really significant — Apple has made a major restart with AR. …

When Apple announced the iPhone back in 2007, many people bristled at the idea of a touchscreen. They’d tried touchscreen technology before — those horrible screens embedded in the back of airplane seats, where the touchscreen didn’t respond to touch correctly. That technology had been built in the way you might build a desktop UI, even expecting a precise point of input, like a mouse. I remember once watching a row of people delicately touching those screens with their fingernail — a technique they’d figured out was more successful at making it work. …