A-ha! 80’s Classic 'Take On Me' Music Video Comes Alive With Impressive Apple ARKit
Fast forward 32 years and someone has created the Take On Me world using Apple ARKit and minds are blown again. If you are unfamiliar with ARKit, it's Apple's native augmented reality platform that will be baked into iOS 11. The ARKit creation was made by Chip Sineni and an AR development team from Trixi Studios based in Chicago. This is just a proof of concept, but if you ever wanted to live in the world of a mid-1980s music video this is definitely the ticket.
The AR proof-of-concept essentially akes you and your AR glass and makes the world around you look hand drawn as it did in the classic video. There is a door behind you that leaves the world looking normal. The developer team behind the project offers few details on how they pulled this off. Sineni says that it uses "overlapping shaders" which sounds like a gross oversimplification.
This is ARKit's A-ha moment— chip sineni (@chipsineni) July 26, 2017
(now shorter and embedded)
@TRIXIstudios #unity3d #AugmentedReality #ar #ARKit pic.twitter.com/TYaNZ2XwIh
If you are wondering where you might be able to download this and try it yourself, it sounds like that won't happen because of music licensing issues. Many of the folks interested in this probably weren't even around in 1985, so we hope that Sineni ditches the music and launches this for us all to play with. It's mind blowing that something this cool has turned up when ARKit is still in preview and we can't help but wonder what the future brings. For those of you not around in 1985 or who lacked cable to watch MTV, the awesome 1985 music video is feature below. That A-Ha track will be stuck in your head all day; you've been warned.
