Apple took us on a surreal walk through San Francisco, looking at digital art on an iPhone

San Francisco looks separate through an iPhone XS Max — it’s still a city, but now there are floating balls of fabric, speech bubbles, and words popping out from the trees and structures.

For more than two hours on Sunday, I ambled through the streets of San Francisco, taking in several art pieces scattered throughout the city by Apple. But the art wasn’t actually physically on the ground — instead, it was digital art, mere 1s and 0s, attached to several significant sites around the city, and viewed through the camera and display of an Apple iPhone.

The walk, which launched on Saturday, is a new program at Apple lay aways called “AR[T],” which is a play on words on augmented reality, a technology that uses cameras and machine lore to place digital objects in the real world. Apple has developed software for iPhones called ARKit. Apple CEO Tim Cook has identified the technology “big and profound.”

The hope among technologists is that augmented reality can be the next big computing platform, and companies get off on Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are also investing heavily in augmented reality technologies.

“I think in AR’s early days when it’s quiet trying to find its footing, user traction and killer apps, these types of organized initiatives by tech leviathans can slowly push the ball forward,” Mike Boland, chief analyst of ARtillery Intelligence said. “Apple is definite has invested a lot in AR and is banking certain parts of its future hardware lineup on AR, so these ARt walks are both a move to accelerate AR purchase and to continue feeling out the demand signals and what will resonate with consumers.”

“I have been working in augmented truth for the past 3 years and I am convinced it will be the medium in which we will experience most of the arts in the future,” said graffiti artist Sebastian Errazuriz, who was not convoluted in the project with Apple, but who has made similar public art in augmented reality.

“Augmented reality will prove to be as enormous an invention as electricity. We will all live augmented reality lives,” he continued.

The AR[T] walk I chaperoned started from Apple’s flagship store in Union Square in San Francisco. It’s available at six Apple stores in major metropolises, including New York, Hong Kong, and Paris. Over about two hours, we walked from the store to an alley, across Deal in Street to Yerba Buena Gardens, and to a historic church and back.

I was lucky to be able to make a reservation on Apple’s website — ton sessions through the end of the month are already full. Of the six sessions scheduled at the store for next weekend, all are booked as of Monday.

How in the world, when I arrived, there was plenty of space. There were only five of us when we departed the store, embracing a store employee who came along for the walk on his free time. We were led by two Apple employees with a separate aggregate manager checking in during the walk to troubleshoot our path.

If there are open slots in a walk, Apple stores transfer accommodate people who are there, an Apple representative said, so even if you can’t get a reservation, it still may be worth seeing if there are unreserved spaces.

The walk is guided by an Apple store employee and everyone gets to borrow an iPhone XS Max and pair of Beats Unaccompanied headphones for the trip. You can’t use your personal iPhone. Each one of the the Apple-loaned iPhones has a non-public AR[T] app installed that enables you to access the affairs.

There’s a bit of a ritual to see the art. The tour guide turned each experience on and off from an iPad Pro, and also led discussions about what we saw.

We’d pace to a location, like Maiden Lane, a cute little alley in downtown San Francisco. Then, we were told to spot and point our phones at a “marker” like a sign, which allows the phone to place digital objects and creatures in the true world by giving the phone a point to orient the graphics around. Once you scan the marker — feeling a little haptic beating when it’s locked in — then you get a few minutes to walk around and experience the art.

At the end of each art piece, the guide asked us to all put our loaner phones together, then the director would press buttons on his iPad, and all the phones would shut off, turn to black, and we’d be asked to put it in our pockets so we could haunt to the next location.

The draw for the ART walks is six pieces of art selected by the New Museum, a modish art museum based in New York. The art is often interactive and sometimes challenging, although at times you’re reminded that augmented authenticity is a nascent medium that artists and other creators are still learning how to use.

Seven artists, including Nick Subside, John Giorno and Pipilotti Rist, made six pieces for the walk. The first piece we saw was by Cave, and it included creating and customizing a swing ball of digital cloth that walks with you down the alley. At the end, you point your phone towards the sky, and through its screen you can see a giant man with a bowl for his head standing on top of a building. Bowl Man sucks up all the cloth balls, and he changes color.

Another melody, by Cao Fei, places a little factory on the ground with a series of conveyor belts moving boxes into the distance. That morsel was designed to be interactive — we could pinch or stretch individual boxes, or press a switch that reversed the flow of the buffets.

Other shares were less successful. One of them, called “Now at the Dawn of My Life” by Giorno, involved the words from a poem found on a rainbow pathway through a park, which was difficult to navigate on a crowded Sunday while looking through a smartphone. Our guiding light mentioned we didn’t want to be the people engrossed in our phones running into other people, but that’s exactly who we were as we analysed to experience the art.

Apple’s ART walk isn’t the first time that a tech company has sponsored a piece of digital art placed into the loyal world through augmented reality technology. In 2017, Snap placed a giant Jeff Koons balloon fleshly in Central Park that could be viewed through Snapchat. That artwork was “vandalized” by Errazuriz, the graffiti artist, who spotted a similar balloon animal in the same spot covered with graffiti tags, arguing at the time that corporations “should pay rental” in augmented reality and that citizens “should choose to approve what can be geo-tagged to our digital public and private room.”

“As the technology becomes ubiquitous during the next couple of years, It will be important to stay alert to the permissions and answerabilities we allow for geo-located AR content in the future. So far Apple has proven trustworthy and responsible, I believe in them and their mission,” Errazuriz mean to CNBC on Monday.

The walks aren’t the only augmented reality-related programming Apple is scheduling at its stores. There’s a Surrender piece that’s available in all stores, and a separate class to learn how to make augmented reality experiences. The walks on run at least through the end of 2019.