The 12 best ARKit apps and games for iOS 11

Stompy dinosaur! That got your attention. Which was probably Apple’s thinking on using a massive Tyrannosaurus rex to illustrate the power of augmented reality. But this also smacks a bit of gimmick – and that’s a problem for the slew of ARKit apps now rampaging around the App Store like a crazed prehistoric beast. So we’ve scoured the App Store for serious apps that help you achieve practical goals and educate yourself, and four fab games that benefit from an added dimension; but also we couldn’t resist throwing into the mix some oddball efforts that are entertainingly daft.

IKEA PLACE

Not sure whether that chair will work in your living room? Well, you could drive to IKEA, lug some boxes home, put the thing together, and collapse in a heap. Or you could have this AR app plonk an AR chair on your rug, and feel a bit smug. (Then realise you like it, and then curse that the app can’t magically turn a virtual chair into the real thing.)

SKY GUIDE AR

The snag with astronomy is the stars unsportingly only come out at night. Until now. With Sky Guide AR, you can map constellations on to the daytime sky, making everyone around you think you’re a nutter when they ask what you’re doing in the blazing sunshine, and you respond: stargazing.

JIGSPACE

When you want to learn about something on your iPhone, you probably head to Wikipedia or YouTube. But JigSpace goes one better, shoving interactive 3D objects in front of your eyeballs – perfect when you urgently need to master how a piano works, the science of tectonic plates, or the anatomy of a trebuchet.

HUMAN ANATOMY ATLAS 2018

This atlas enables you to place a virtual cadaver on a table, then gleefully dissect it. Although the app’s aimed at medical students, it’s fascinating for anyone who wants to know more about anything from skeletons to organs.

ARISE

There are hints of Monument Valley about ARise, in that it involves impossible pathways. But rather than mucking about with Escher-like constructions, ARise has you regularly shift your view of each puzzle, using perspective to ‘join’ pieces of landscape and have a pint-sized adventurer dodder onwards to their goal.

GNOG

This deranged puzzle game has you fiddling with snoozing heads that contain weird and whacky dioramas, the aim being to wake them up so they’ll sing to you. In flat-o-vision, they look like children’s toys created by a designer hopped up on sugar. In AR, that effect is heightened, with the strange contraptions dumped on a table, ready for perusal.

SPLITTER CRITTERS

In 2D, Splitter Critters is brilliant – sort-of Lemmings meets Fruit Ninja, with you slicing and dragging the landscape to help toddling aliens to their ship. Initially, the AR mode looks like Splitter Critters in a box – until you twist your device and realise the pathfinding antics now happen across three dimensions.

SMASH TANKS!

It’s not so much ‘smash tanks’ as ‘smash everything’ in this gleefully destructive mash-up of board game, Angry Birds ping-and-release controls, and seminal head-to-head videogame Tank. Project the arena on anything from a coffee table to a large outdoor space, then drag/aim/release to careen about, grabbing airdropped weapons, wrecking the landscape, and smashing up your opponent’s tanks.

CARROT WEATHER

Helmed by an AI determined to end the human race, CARROT Weather bides its time dishing out weather forecasts and snark (such as suggesting a cloud “looks like you getting garrotted by an assassin”). In AR mode, she hovers menacingly above the table, like an Apple HomePod infused with the combined personality of HAL 9000 and Siân Lloyd.

HOUSECRAFT

We started this round-up with IKEA’s app, and Housecraft is in broadly similar territory. But there’s a rather more mischievous edge here, with you being able to resize objects and dump dozens of them in a huge pile. If you ever want to know what 15 sofas would look like in your flat, now’s your chance.

GIPHY WORLD

With GIFs and stickers having infected every corner of the internet, GIPHY World invites you to have them take over your home. Drag and drop stickers into 3D space, walk around, take videos, become hypnotised by the weirdness, and reason Apple’s stompy Tyrannosaurus was in fact actually quite sensible for illustrating AR after all.

PCALC

You might wonder how a calculator can benefit from AR. Presumably, so did PCalc’s author. So instead, he transformed his app’s ‘about’ screen into a bizarre sandbox where you lob infinite iPhones and anti-gravity bananas about the place. It’s certainly a step on from tapping out 5318008 and flipping a calculator upside-down for a chuckle.

The 12 best ARKit apps and games for iOS 11