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Home / Features / The best ARKit apps and games for iOS 12 you’ll actually want to use

The best ARKit apps and games for iOS 12 you’ll actually want to use

Bring another dimension to your iPhone or iPad with these augmented reality greats

Stompy dinosaur! That got your attention. Which was probably Apple’s thinking when it initially introduced the power of augmented reality by way of a massive Tyrannosaurus rex. 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 a handful of fab games that benefit from an added dimension; but, well, we just couldn’t resist throwing into the mix some oddball efforts that are entertainingly daft.

Six seriously good ARKit apps to install today

Use your iPhone or iPad to amble about a virtual gallery, audition furniture, stare at the stars, and learn what makes things – including you – tick.

Shepard Fairey AR – Damage

Shepard Fairey AR - Damage

Walk around a warehouse-sized exhibition by the bloke who created the Obama HOPE poster. It’s cheaper than a gallery ticket, but the app still lets you get up close and personal with the artwork. You can even hear the fizz of a nearby neon sign, and – optionally – the artist explaining his work in your ear.

Get Shepard Fairey AR – Damaged (£4.99)

Civilisations AR

Civilisations AR

The BBC wants to inject some education into your brain, mostly by having you gawp at things the British pilfered from other countries. With AR, you no longer have to hoof it to a museum, though – you can now check out a Corinthian helmet and 30 other artefacts as they hover in front of your face.

Get Civilisations AR (£free)

IKEA Place

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 instead 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.)

Get IKEA Place (£free)

Sky Guide AR

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 by saying you’re stargazing.

Get Sky Guide AR (£2.99)

JigSpace

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.

Get JigSpace (£free)

Human Anatomy Atlas 2019

Human Anatomy Atlas 2019

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. Keen but can’t quite stomach the price tag? Try oddball levitating organ Insight Heart for two quid instead.

Get Human Anatomy Atlas 2019 (£11.99)

Five ARKit games that bring a new dimension to play

Always being told gaming’s a sedentary pursuit? Not with these titles, which force you to get off of your bum to play.

Monster Park – AR Dino World

Monster Park - AR Dino World

Should you be of the opinion it’s crushingly unfair that only eccentric owners of genetics companies with dubious safety records should have access to a dinosaur park, this app sets things right by putting one on your desk. T-Rexes stomp and pterosaurs screech – until you create your own extinction event by repeatedly whacking them with a finger.

Get Monster Park – AR Dino World (£2.99)

AR Smash Tanks!

AR 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.

Get AR Smash Tanks! (£1.99)

GNOG

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 or carpet, ready for perusal.

Get GNOG (£2.99)

Splitter Critters

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.

Get Splitter Critters (£2.99)

ARise

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, you ‘join’ pieces of landscape, in order to help a pint-sized adventurer dodder onwards to their goal.

Get ARise (£2.99)

Five slices of ARKit weirdness you have to try

As you might expect, not everyone’s taking augmented reality entirely seriously. Here’s our pick of the more ‘out there’ apps.

Scanbot

Scanbot

No, we’re not losing our minds: Scanbot has some full-on AR inside, in the form of a sort-of game. In fact, you get a fast-paced score-attack effort, where you must scan as many virtual documents as possible within 60 seconds. It certainly beats a humdrum approach to tutorials, and it’s a neatly quirky way to approach AR.

Get Scanbot (£free)

CARROT Weather

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.

Get CARROT Weather (£4.99)

GIPHY World

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.

Get GIPHY World (£free)

Housecraft

Housecraft

We earlier in this round-up mentioned 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.

Get Housecraft (£free)

PCalc

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.

Get PCalc (£9.99)

Profile image of Craig Grannell Craig Grannell Contributor

About

I’m a regular contributor to Stuff magazine and Stuff.tv, covering apps, games, Apple kit, Android, Lego, retro gaming and other interesting oddities. I also pen opinion pieces when the editor lets me, getting all serious about accessibility and predicting when sentient AI smart cookware will take over the world, in a terrifying mix of Bake Off and Terminator.

Areas of expertise

Mobile apps and games, Macs, iOS and tvOS devices, Android, retro games, crowdfunding, design, how to fight off an enraged smart saucepan with a massive stick.