A New App Turns Your Living Room Into the ‘Take on Me’ Video

Finally: A practical application for augmented reality

July 31, 2017 9:00 am

Two things had to happen for Norwegian group A-ha to write one of the best-remembered songs of the ’80s:

1) They changed the name from “All’s Well That Ends Well and Moves With the Sun” to the far more accessible “Take on Me.” And 2) they made a video featuring a technique called rotoscoping that blended more than 2,000 pencil sketches with footage from the real world.

That video took 16 weeks. The one you see above — which was created by  TRIXI studios using an augmented reality app they built for iOS 11’s ARKit framework — took a couple of days.

We’re not experts, but essentially what the ARKit toolbox does is let developers add AR content into their apps through existing framework that doesn’t require extra programming.

“When ARKit came along, we were very excited by the idea that just ‘normal’ phones could do such great AR, so it seemed like the perfect situation to stress test what ARKit could do,” TRIXI founder Chip Sineni told The Verge. “We really wanted that effect of turning your world into the ‘Take on Me’ experience, not a baked in experience.”

The app isn’t available to the public yet, but it does show what to expect coming down the pike.

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