The new iPad Pro’s LIDAR scanner can turn your living room into an augmented reality version of Hot Lava, a video game based on childhood hobbies that jumps over furniture to avoid imaginary lava. This announcement was included as part of today’s iPad Pro announcement.
Hot Lava is available on Steam, but the mobile version is currently only for Apple Arcade. According to Apple, “The new iPad Pro’s LiDAR scanner will enable Hot Lava’s new AR mode, which will be released later this year.”
This game is a smart way to show off the features of a LIDAR scanner.
The player scans the living room with the iPad, and the app creates a hot lava on the floor and creates a platform for game characters to jump in AR. Here is the GIF of the app in action:
Along with the AR version of Hot Lava, Apple today showed the journalists an impressive use of the LIDAR scanner in a briefing. One scans the room for the CAD app Shapr3D and creates a 3D model of the room in the app. Then the user can edit that model to add new objects to the room and use AR to see what was added in the actual room.
Another demo for the anatomy application Complete Anatomy uses a LIDAR scanner to measure someone’s arm’s range of motion in real time. The demo of the IKEA Place app scans a room and recommends matching furniture you can see in the room in AR.
According to Apple, all displayed demos will be available as features in each app later this year.