By: Paul Veugen
We’re excited that the Fitness AR team is joining Mapbox to help us design the future of location data and maps.
At Mapbox, Adam Debrezceni and Eric Florenzano will apply their experience and drive for designing and building for core AR and VR, to exciting new projects that mix our real-time location data and the world around you. They’ll help bridge the gap between the art-of-the-possible and everyday value for mobile apps in industries like weather, social, fitness, sports, and travel. We’re thrilled to team up with Adam and Eric to help developers build magical new experiences and drive engagement with our SDKs.
After the introduction Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore, hundreds of millions of people can now get an early glimpse of the future with new experiences in AR on their everyday device. Within a day after Apple released the first beta of ARKit, Adam shared an early proof of concept visualizing one of his Strava activities on his coffee table using the Maps SDK for Unity and ARKit. In the weeks leading up to the public iOS 11 release, he teamed up with Eric Florenzano to turn his proof of concept into a polished interactive experience, shipping right on time to make a big splash on the App Store. Following their progress and working together with them to push what’s possible with our SDKs was an amazing experience and made us even more excited to work together.
AR is all about context. Building on top of our real-time map of the world, we let developers mix location data into AR experiences to build contextual experiences and help people understand the world around them. Every day, we process over 225 million miles of anonymous data to build a real-time map of the world. With every user using our maps, our maps become a bit better. We’re enabling developers to build on top of real-time anonymous sensor data to create magical new experiences, and we learn a little bit more about the world around us with every single interaction.
To build engaging, immersive AR experiences, as designers and developers, we need to learn and adapt our thinking, our tools, and inspire users to try and learn new interaction patterns. Designing for AR requires new skills and the ability to mix physical space, time, and real-time data in our products. Together with Adam and Eric, we’re going to build up a product design team to explore what maps and location experiences will look like in the future, working closely together with our customers and community. Reach out if you want to learn more.
As one of the first showcases of AR and Mapbox, you can now download the Fitness AR app on the App Store for free. We’ll continue to support the app with SDK updates and are excited to explore what other AR experiences in different categories can look like.
Welcome to the team, Adam and Eric!
Mapbox ❤️ Fitness AR was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.