ARkit Location Anchors

Hello Victor,

The Location Anchor feature new with ARKit 4.0 can support the use-case you describe. We even have an example implementation of a use-case very close to the one you described where you can place Location Anchors on AR planes and then save those locations to a file. You can then use that file to reload and view the Location Anchors you saved later on. I hope the app gives you some guidance in satisfying your use-case.

You can learn about the public example app here:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/tracking_geographic_locations_in_ar

You can learn more about the Location Anchor feature from our WWDC Presentation on ARKit 4.0 here:
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10611/

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Hi, I just started exploring the example app... We can import lat lon data w/GPX Parser to anchor multiple locations without actually going there, right?

Yes, you only need valid latitude and longitude values. Altitude is optional: If not provided, ARKit will place objects at ground level. There are several ways to obtain latitude and longitude, I recommend those two:

1. Look up the lat/lon coordinate in Apple Maps, see https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10611/ (at 7:42).
2. Convert a point in ARKit coordinates to (latitude, longitude, altitude) while running an ARKit session, see https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/arsession/3571352-getgeolocation

Both these approaches are also illustrated in the sample app: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/content_anchors/tracking_geographic_locations_in_ar in

Create an Anchor When the User Taps the Map

and

Create an Anchor When the User Taps the AR View