Apple has made no secret of the fact that it is getting into the world of augmented reality in a big way. iOS 11 contained ARKit and was a step in the right direction but, this time things have moved up a notch. In line with their new handset releases the iPhone Xs, iPhone Xs Max and iPhone XR, the latest incarnation of the operating system iOS 12 has even more support for augmented reality. It doesn’t even matter if you have an older handset, because although the new phones have unique AR camera technology some of the features work just as well on the cameras of older handsets.

One Tool for All

If you remember the days when a mobile phone was just that, you could make calls and send texts, then you probably also had a pocket full of tools. Well, to be fair you probably kept them at home, but our iPhones have now become torches, credit cards, notepads and much more. You can now add to the list because you now have an accurate tape measure in your phone. Gone are the days of frantically hunting around the house to see where you left the tape measure, simply whip out your phone, and provided you have upgraded to iOS 12 you will now see you have the ‘Measure’ app.

Measure it

So, what happens when you open the app? Well, every time you start the app it will need to calibrate and get used to the surroundings. The camera will activate within the app, and you will be guided on moving the handset slowly around the area. You can stand still and do this, just move the phone slowly until the app has finished calibrating. Now you are good to go. A guide dot will appear on the screen and tell you to pick a point. You will need to be within about eight feet of the start point, so move closer if needed. The app looks for objects, so we found that when measuring the size of a room, the dot could not lock on to anything. A sneaky trick is to place your finger on the wall, and the app happily locks on. Press the on-screen button and the tap locks on to the starting point, and you are free to move. Take the phone in a continuous line to the end point, where again you will need to find a marker, so use a finger again if nothing comes up. Press the button once more, and the line changes to a fixed white line with the distance displayed.

The app can accurately measure small items, from the length of a pencil, right up to things like rooms. This is an excellent app for making sure a piece of furniture will fit a room, or for deciding what size curtains to buy, and we are confident it has a range of uses for plenty of other things that are not so domestic goddess in