Before you read further, you may want to make sure you're wearing brown pants if you scare easily.
Developer Abhishek Singh conjured an augmented reality experience that recreates the spine-tingling scene from The Ring where (spoiler alert) the ghost of Samara (or Sadako, from the original Ringu) emerges from the television.
Based on a demo posted on YouTube, virtual Samara appears once the scene in the movie is cued on the screen. The digital demon continues to follow the user as he flees the vicinity. (I cannot yet confirm that watching this demo will curse you to the same experience per the legend of the movie.)
In the comments accompanying the video posted to Reddit, Singh confirmed that the experience was built using Unity and ARKit, though, because he began working on the experience prior to the release of the ARKit 1.5 developer preview, he positioned an occluder to simulate the TV plane detection. To recreate the chase component, Singh's app drops virtual waypoints for the virtual ghost to follow.
Singh isn't the first developer to tackle this experience, as developer Mike Woods recreated the same scene (minus the chase) using ARKit and rotoscoping from the movie scene itself.
Nevertheless, Singh is clearly having fun with this whole augmented reality thing. We last saw Singh in New York's Central Park, showing off the first level of Super Mario Bros. that he recreated for HoloLens.
For apps that customers might someday install for themselves, Singh is working on an app from AiFi called Holo Messenger. The app re-enacts the famous hologram message that Princess Leia recorded with R2D2 for Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope. With the app, users can record messages to send to others, delivered via ARKit by a virtual R2D2.
The app is not yet available (I imagine they'll have to scrub out the Star Wars IP), but a sign-up form is available for those who want to be notified regarding its release.
Just updated your iPhone to iOS 18? You'll find a ton of hot new features for some of your most-used Apple apps. Dive in and see for yourself:
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