Microsoft shows off ‘Minecraft Earth’ AR game demo at WWDC 2019 alongside Apple’s new AR features

In early May, Microsoft announced Minecraft Earth– a new augmented reality take on the insanely popular Minecraft game. The goal of the new AR Minecraft is to cover the real world in Minecraft blocks with your friends. Now we have our first look at it!

Yesterday, Apple kicked off their annual Worldwide Developers Conference, which included a 2 hour presentation from the company. They showed off some extremely cool looking new AR features for their phones and tablets. In particular, the “People Occlusion” feature sparked my interest- the ability to put AR objects behind a person is something you can’t do on the current iteration of the HoloLens.

During the AR portion of the presentation, two Mojang employees (Mojang is the Microsoft-owned developer of Minecraft) came on stage to show off how they’ve used this new feature in Minecraft Earth- and it seems as though they’ve pushed it to an extreme- using People Occlusion to put the players in a Minecraft environment in real time. Half a decade ago, you would need a green screen or rotoscoping and substantial amounts of manual labor to pull this kind of thing off- now you can do it on a cell phone.

Much like Pokemon GO, there is an important social aspect to Minecraft Earth- you can explore the real world with your friends, and you will all see the same adventure unfold on your phones. Having multiple people interact with the same virtual object in real time on different mobile devices is no easy feat- GPS by itself isn’t accurate enough to sell that effect, nor are phone cameras alone.

Microsoft is using Azure computer vision technology to achieve this, creating holograms that are persistent across devices- a system that borrows from Microsoft’s HoloLens algorithms. This secret sauce is not going to be exclusive to Minecraft Earth. Rest assured, these tools will be available for developers to use in other iOS and Android apps.

Creating these real world scale AR shared experiences is incredibly ambitious- but if anyone is able to pull it off, it’s Microsoft. Not to mention, in launching something like this, they are able to collect data that will help them improve their Hololens, Azure and cloud services in the long run.

There’s no sign of Minecraft Earth coming to the HoloLens, despite it being teased as a demo years ago. But that makes sense to me- the HoloLens is not a consumer focused device. It’s for high end AR experiences that a phone can’t deliver.

Apple has also been using their AR software to show off the hardware layout of the new Mac Pro. In fact, if you go to the Mac Pro site on an iPad or iPhone, you can use AR to see what it would look like on your desk. Very cool!

It seems like while Microsoft is pushing forward with developing advanced AR tools, Apple is fully embracing augmented reality as well, and showing it off in ways that are useful to the average person. Developments like this are very exciting to us! The more consumer facing companies like Apple push the adoption of AR to the masses, the better the technology will get for everyone.

We’re looking forward to what the future holds for these technologies, and we can’t wait to implement some of these new tools into the custom interactive solutions we build for our customers!