The AR platform wars have officially commenced

Ever since Apple announced ARKit at its annual developers conference earlier this summer, the app-making community has enthusiastically shown off what it has been able to make with the new framework for augmented reality apps. ARKit hasn’t even officially launched yet, and already we’ve seen demos of AR fidget spinners, floating cats, and fancy car configurators on iPhones.

Serious, groundbreaking stuff, right?

But it’s sometimes the fun, toy-like technologies that give way to more serious use cases, which is probably why Apple seems to determined to show off other demonstrations of AR apps that will roll out with iOS 11 next month. Half a dozen app developers gathered on Apple’s campus in Cupertino, Calif. yesterday to demo their upcoming AR apps and talk about their development processes, including big brand names like Ikea, The Food Network, AMC TV, Giphy, and more.

Some app developers, like UK-based Climax Studios and Brooklyn-based Touch Press, talked about how relatively easy it was to create an ARKit app, sometimes in just six to eight weeks. Many talked about the technical capabilities that have been unlocked with ARKit.

But almost all of the developers there said the same thing: it’s Apple’s giant audience, its many millions of iPhone and iPad users, that they think could be the real game-changer in AR. Apple’s pre-arranged gathering of AR app-makers also occurred just as Google is launching ARCore, a new platform for AR app developers that could expand Google’s AR reach in a significant way. If there was ever a moment that marked the real start of the mobile AR platform wars, it’s probably now, and all before the fall hardware season has even begun.

Ikea was on hand at Apple yesterday, and showed off a new AR app for iOS called Ikea Place. It’s a riff on other furniture try-on apps we’ve already seen in AR, whether on Google’s Tango AR platform or in 2D furniture apps. You open up the Ikea app on the iPhone, use the phone’s camera to measure the space around you, and “place” an Ikea furniture item in front of you. You can walk up to the item, get a sense of its size, see materials and texture, and in a future version of the app, you’ll even be able to tap on a virtual sofa to see how big it is when it expands to become a sofa bed.

 Apple, Inc.

Michael Valdsgaard, Ikea’s head of digital transformation, said that the company has been working on 2D AR features for almost five years, but that it developed a new app for ARKit because of reach. “Apple is the one who reaches many people,” he said.

Simon Gardner, the chief executive officer at Climax Studios, concurred. His new AR game for iOS, Arise, creates a virtual puzzle in real space that can only be solved by physically tilting the iPhone or iPad and steering a character through this puzzle. Climax Studios has long dabbled in AR, and created a game called Towers for Tango for Google’s Tango AR platform. Gardner says they’ve also worked on apps for Microsoft’s HoloLens before, though none have published.

The biggest difference between building for those platforms, and building for iOS, is the size of the audience, Gardner said. “You have a potential install base on day one of hundreds of millions of devices.”

The biggest advantage Apple has with ARKit is that AR apps will run on any existing device that’s both equipped with an A9 processor and running iOS 11 software, which is currently still in beta. This means any iPhone 6S or later, or any iPad Pro, will run these AR apps.

Apple also has the advantage of owning the “full stack” in the iPhone and iPad: it controls everything from the iOS software right down to every component in every piece of hardware, which means the experience of how apps run on said devices is tightly controlled as well.

 Apple, Inc.

This means Google’s approach to AR has had to be a very different one, since Android shows up on devices of all sizes and specifications. The company has been working on its AR solution, called Tango, since 2013, and developed specific hardware and software requirements that phone manufacturers would have to adopt in order to support advanced AR. As a result, only two phone models to date, the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro and Asus ZenFone AR, have shipped with Tango.

But just this morning, Google announced something called ARCore, its equivalent to Apple’s ARKit. It’s a built-in AR platform for app makers, and is available now on Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy 8 phones, with the hopes that it will run on 100 million phones by this winter. This could expand the community for Google AR apps significantly, and The Verge’s Adi Robertson says that the controlled ARCore demo she had at Google’s offices was “one of the best experiences I’ve had with phone-based AR.” Google is also working on two experimental AR web browsers, one that will use ARCore and one that will run on iOS and support ARKit.

Certainly there are some technical advancements happening with Apple’s ARKit that are notable. ARKit enables something called “world tracking,” which, as my Verge colleague Adi Robertson has reported before, relies on a technique called visual-inertial odometry. Most AR on phones so far has involved 2D, flat overlays — think Pokémon Go — whereas the kind of AR we’re talking about now is advanced, 3D AR.

AMC’s The Walking Dead AR app, which is called Our World and was developed by Next Games, using an ARKit feature called ARPointCloud that lets developers hide objects in an AR environment and reveal them at a certain point in the experience. This is especially useful in a game like Our World, where walkers (zombies) appear to crawl out of the corners around you, at intervals, as you continue to play the game.

 Apple, Inc.

Some ARKit apps will incorporate multi-player or collaborative features as well. AMC and Next Games showed off how you’ll be able to invite friends to slay zombies with you in Our World; and the new Giphy AR app, called Giphy World, lets you create an AR environment filled with 3D confetti or cartoon hamburgers or 2D gifs floating around the room, and share a URL with another user who can add more Giphy content to your AR world.

Other ARKit apps might be simpler, like The Very Hungry Caterpillar AR app. A caterpillar inches around the room you’re in; you feed it when you feel like it; and eventually it turns into a butterfly. When you look up through the lens of an iPhone or iPad, it joins the dozens of other butterflies that have been created through previous game plays.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that iPhone and iPad users will be immune to the same problems that plague other advanced AR platforms — the gimmicky apps, the drain on device battery life, and the overall feeling that you’re sometimes using an AR app not because it makes sense but just because it’s a new AR app. These have all been very real barriers to AR becoming more mainstream.

But what will set ARKit apart, according to Barry O’Neill, chief executive officer of Caterpillarapp-maker Touch Press, is the “ease of use from a developer perspective and the scale of the audience.”

“Consumers are going to work with AR in a very natural way now,” he said.

Correction: A previous version of this article erroneously said that Google’s ARCore would launch this winter. It’s available on Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy 8 phones now, and Google says it hopes it will run on 100 million devices by this winter.

Record-Breaking Galaxy Find Sheds Light on Magnetic Universe

Astronomers have detected the magnetic field of a galaxy located a whopping 5 billion light-years from Earth.

“This finding is exciting,” Sui Ann Mao, an astronomer from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, said in a statement. “It is now the record holder of the most distant galaxy for which we have this magnetic-field information.”

Mao led the team that made the find. The researchers used the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, a radio telescope network in New Mexico, to detect and characterize the magnetic field of the distant galaxy. [Top 10 Strangest Things in Space]

They found that the field is similar in strength and configuration to that of the Milky Way, even though the scrutinized galaxy is 5 billion years younger than our own.

“This means that magnetism is generated very early in a galaxy’s life by natural processes, and thus that almost every heavenly body is magnetic,” study co-author Bryan Gaensler, a professor at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, said in the same statement. “The implication is that we need to understand magnetism to understand the universe.”

Measuring the magnetic fields of other galaxies that are at different distances from Earth and are different ages can help astronomers better understand how cosmic magnetism evolves, study team members said. Since a faraway magnetic field can’t be detected directly, astronomers rely on observations of the magnetic fingerprint left on light passing through the field. This imprint is also known as Faraday rotation.

https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.177.1_en.html#goog_180145989

The astronomers discovered a quasar — an incredibly bright galactic core powered by a supermassive black hole — located beyond the galaxy being studied, along the same line of sight. As the bright light from the quasar passes through the galaxy’s magnetic field, it picks up the Faraday rotation fingerprint, providing astronomers with the information they need to learn more about the field’s strength and direction, the researchers said.

“Nobody knows where cosmic magnetism comes from or how it was generated,” Gaensler said in the statement. “But now, we have obtained a major clue needed for solving this mystery, by extracting the fossil record of magnetism in a galaxy billions of years before the present day.”

Their findings were published today (Aug. 28) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

YOUTUBE HAS A NEW LOOK AND, FOR THE FIRST TIME, A NEW LOGO

Taking the “Tube” out of its tube

For the last 12 years, YouTube’s logo has been a pair of anachronisms wrapped inside each other. “We have the word tube in a tube,” says Christopher Bettig, the head of YouTube’s art department. “This is weird. No one know what this is.” Tube is slang for a television set, which used to be powered by vacuum tubes. But neither tubes nor TVs are central to the world’s biggest video service, which now reaches over 1.5 billion people each month, streaming to almost any screen with an internet connection.

And so today the brand is getting its biggest aesthetic makeover ever. The YouTube logo is being refreshed, shifting the emphasis away from the word “Tube” and onto the familiar play button which has already become an iconic shorthand for the company. The service is also getting a new typeface, color scheme, and a bunch of major changes to the look, feel, and functionality of its desktop and mobile app.

Though today’s logo change is the most significant in YouTube’s history, it’s not a complete transformation, like the morphing of Uber’s silver U into a backwards C. “It’s an evolution, not a revolution,” says Bettig. But the company is also using the moment to announce a basket of new features, planned changes, and ongoing experiments. The new look is a ribbon that ties these moves together, highlighting the company’s broader shift from a singular website to a family of different apps that stretch across multiple platforms.

The challenge facing YouTube’s design and interaction team when they launched the redesign two years ago was how to tie together a host of products with very different audiences and uses. What started in 2005 as a singular website built for desktop internet users now exists on phones, tablets, game consoles, and, yes, television sets. What’s more, YouTube is no longer a single brand. Over the last few years it has spawned a family of services: YouTube Kids, Gaming, Red, TV, and Music. “We felt, because of all that growth, we were missing the mark. We wanted to make something more unified and cohesive, something that really reads as YouTube,” says Bettig. “We were hoping to build a visual language that would make it easy for folks to recognize it.”

Bettig, a Frenchman who joined Google six years ago and has been with YouTube for the past three, led the charge to rethink the logo. Since YouTube was evolving into a whole family of services, and since it had adapted to fit each screen and video format, Bettig and his team experimented with a dynamic brand. “We had a symbol that was loosely reminiscent of a Y, but it would be always changing, animated, and pulling color samples from the video you were watching. It could potentially pull the profile picture or header art from the channel you were watching. So you have these dynamic elements that would all be intersecting.”

This approach worked well when the designers had it mocked up on a white wall in their studio and in simple prototype apps. “Then as soon as we dropped it in product it was like, oh yeah, that’s not going to work,” said Bettig. “It’s pure chaos.”

In the end, the art department decided to keep things simple. They would put a new spin on the logo, but rely on iconography that had, over the years, already come to signify the brand. “Over the years, organically, that play button, that UI element that is front and center on every video, became a brand ambassador, an unofficial shorthand.” In consumer research, the team found there was little difference in recognition between that icon and the word YouTube itself. “This thing has taken on a life of its own.”

Once they had decided to keep the play button and wordmark, the team set about modernizing them. “The old logo has a typeface from 1903, alternate gothic number two, and it’s been manually tweaked, so there are weird design nerd things that are off. The U in Tube is not the same as the U in You, so if you take them and overlay they don’t exactly line up,” said Bettig. The same went for the play button, whose four corners weren’t all rounded the same way. These were little tells, for those with a keen eye, that design had taken a backseat over the years to scaling the product and supporting new features. There was no art department at YouTube until Bettig started it three years ago. Now he and his team had the chance to clean things up.

They decided to ditch the original typeface and design one of their own. They experimented with fonts based on styles from classic television and the VHS era as well as more modern looks. In the end, they went with something that retained the essence of print. “We wanted to keep the history, and the tension of a media typeface that was made in 1903 to be typeset manually with a digital platform that reaches farther than any newspaper of the time could ever conceive of.” For the play button’s updated color, the team tried to find a grounding in the medium. “Looking at reds, we wanted to go for something that would tie to video,” Bettig explained. They settled on #FF0000, “a really pure red that goes to the RGB of video.”

The new font, logo, and color are rolling out today on YouTube’s desktop and mobile app. The goal now is to work them into the entire family of services the video giant now offers. “As we diverge from the main product, how do we grow but clearly communicate, even to casual users browsing the app store, hey, this is a Youtube product,” says Bettig.

Along with a new logo, the desktop and mobile app are both being updated to bring them in line with the Material Designaesthetic that extends across Google’s properties like Android, Search, and Docs. “We’re a high density site, so that makes Material a great base to build on,” says Robert Thompson, the design lead for video viewing and navigation. Moving to Material means there are fewer shadows, boxes, and forms on each page. “It helps make the site feel more comfortable and readable, and brings the content to the foreground.” Like the new logo, the move to Material helps to weave a common design language across an ever-expanding universe of apps.

Along with unifying design, YouTube is working to bring feature parity to different versions of its service. Starting today variable speed playback, a popular feature on the desktop, is arriving on mobile. And while it hasn’t happened yet, the design team says well-received features from mobile may soon migrate over to desktop. Mobile has a mini-player that allows you to continue watching whatever video you have in progress while also browsing for the next clip you want to see, and YouTube is testing a version of that for desktop web browsers.

If Bettig’s challenge was how to unify the look and feel of YouTube’s ever expanding family of apps, the goal of the product team was to ensure that users got the best experience out of YouTube, even as the number of ways they might use it continues to grow. “We started with a website and SD video,” says Manuel Bronstein, the vice president of product management. “We’re in a world where people are watching HD video on mobile devices, and streaming on tablets and TVs. We have to be able to adapt the experience to best suit the device and context in which people are consuming it.”

Take something as simple as the video format. When YouTube started, it had one option: horizontal rectangles. But these days videos uploaded by the average creator are just as likely to be vertical or square. And that often meant a lousy experience, with a vertical video taking up just a portion of the available screen.“One of the things we all collectively hated was the black bars,” says Bronstein, YouTube’s VP of product management. “A small picture and black bars.”

Like Bettig and his team, the first impulse was to create something dynamic, allowing the context to guide the best design. They played with a parallax effect, where you could move your phone to scroll up and down inside a vertical video. “This idea did not survive the first contact with users,” said Bronstein. Instead, the team settled on a player that gives almost the entire screen over to the vertical video in its native format, leaving just a small bar at the bottom for controls, and allowing users to dismiss that if they want to go full screen. The player adapts on the fly. If a vertical video ends and the next clip is horizontal, square, or even 360, the format will automatically adjust.

A lot of these changes, from the desktopredesign to the vertical video, have already been rolled out as experiments, available to small groups of users or those who opt in. As with any massive online service, the trick is to change out parts of the plane while keeping it in flight. YouTube knows that it has to move carefully to avoid upsetting the millions of creators who make a living through their videos, and whose bottom line might be impacted by even a small change to the layout or functionality of the service. While they aren’t as dramatic as a shiny new logo, changes like this are arguably more profound, moving YouTube towards a mobile native experience that matches the way the majority of their audience now interacts with the service. The ultimate goal for YouTube, of course, is to get you watching more videos for longer periods of time. And the more intuitive a feature is, the more widely it’s likely to be used.

Take a new feature introduced in February of this year that lets users rewind or fast forward by double tapping their screen.T here was a small percentage of people who double-tap the player to see the remaining time of the video, and they hated when this new feature caused them to skip ahead. “We had no clue about this until we ran the feature at scale and all we heard were some complaints, but no positive feedback,” says Thompson, who leads design for video navigation. “When we turned off the experiment to tune some things, we were buried under an avalanche of feedback demanding that the feature be turned back on. That’s when we knew we had something successful.” The gesture is now used billions of times each day, and has quickly surpassed the scroll bar for navigating through a video.

YouTube is now experimenting with a new approach to mobile browsing. Simply swipe left and the service will cue up a new video based on its recommendation algorithms, offering an infinite smorgasbord of possible entertainment. Skipped something but decide later it actually seemed interesting? Just swipe right to find it again. Finding gestures that resonate with their audience is the best way for the team to bring cohesion to a service used by 1.5 billion people across hundreds of countries and dozens of languages. “We’re trying to create a common language across all our apps, to use design to give them an element of consistency,” said Bronstein. “We are always striving to make it feel more human.”

Alexa’s new music feature makes your speakers work like Sonos

Playing music around the house with your Alexa speakers just got a lot better. Here’s how to set it up.

While Amazon’s Alexa speakers are capable of controlling your home, helping you cook dinner and order things without lifting a finger, the speakers especially excel at streaming music. However, until recently, Alexa speakers haven’t played well together. Having multiple Echo or Echo Dots spread around the house felt more like having several independent speakers instead of satellite speakers that communicate and work in unison.

Added in June, Drop In allowed users to call one another using supported Echo devices and, within a household, the feature effectively turned a network of Echo devices into an intercom system.

Now, if you have multiple Alexa speakers, you can use them to control music playback around your house, a la Sonos. In fact, this new feature could be indication that the release of the rumored Alexa-powered Sonos speaker is nigh.

To play music on another Alexa speaker, just add the name of the speaker you want to play music through to the end of your request. For example:

• “Alexa, play folk music on bedroom.”
• “Alexa, play focus music in the office.”
• “Alexa, play Band of Horses in the living room.”
• “Alexa, play Criminal podcast in the kitchen.”

With that said, it’s a smart idea to rename your Alexa speakers to something that is easy to remember and pronounce — ideally, the name of the room the speaker is in.

Intel unveils AI-focused Movidius VPU chip

The Myriad X VPU comes with improved processing capabilities for edge devices such as drones, VR headsets, smart cameras, wearables, and robots.

Intel on Monday announced its next-generation Movidius vision processing unit with improved processing capabilities for edge devices such as drones, VR headsets, smart cameras, wearables, and robots.

The on-chip hardware block is designed specifically to run deep neural networks at high speed and low power. Intel says the deep neural network accelerator can achieve over one trillion operations per second of computing on DNN inferences.

“We’re on the cusp of computer vision and deep learning becoming standard requirements for the billions of devices surrounding us every day,” said Intel VP Remi El-Ouazzane. “Enabling devices with humanlike visual intelligence represents the next leap forward in computing.”

Intel touts the Myriad X as ideal VPU for autonomous device platforms due its tiny form factor and on-board processing power. In addition to its Neural Compute Engine, Myriad X also comes with 128-bit VLIW vector processors, increased configurable MIPI lanes, enhanced vision accelerators, and 2.5 MB of homogenous on-chip memory.

Intel said the Myriad X VPU comes with an SDK that includes a neural network compiler and “a specialized FLIC framework with a plug-in approach to developing application pipelines.”

PREVIOUS AND RELATED COVERAGE:

Movidius, Hikvision partner to make smarter security cameras

The Movidius Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit will be used to run deep neural networks for higher accuracy, local video analytics.

Intel’s Movidius launches AI accelerator on a $79 USB stick

The Movidius Neural Compute Stick compiles, tunes and accelerates neural networks at the edge.

Intel snaps up Movidius to create future computer vision, VR tech

The deal could push Intel further into next-generation technologies including VR, drones and artificial intelligence.

Google has developed a tool that lets you permanently mute websites that automatically play videos with sound.

It’s an extremely irritating problem, and the new option will be welcomed by the majority of internet users.

Videos – often ads – that play with sound can be distracting, especially if you’re trying to watch or listen to something at the time.

To turn one off, you usually need to stop what you’re doing, figure out which background tab it’s playing from and then scroll down the page to actually find it.

Google is only experimenting with the feature right now, according to Chromium evangelist François Beaufort, so it’s not currently available to Chrome users.

“This will give you more control about which website is allowed to throw sound at you automatically,” he said in a Google+ post.

You can, however, try it out in Chrome Canary, an experimental and unstable version of the browser.

• READ MORE

Google changes search results to stop users clicking irrelevant videos

The mute feature is off by default though, so you’ll first have to enable it by running Canary with the “–enable-features=SoundContentSetting” switch.

Once that’s on, you can mute a website by clicking the View Site Information symbol – it may look like a padlock – on the left-hand edge of the omnibar and selecting Sound.

Once you mute a website, it won’t automatically play videos with sound again until you unmute it.

Icons discovered in WatchOS 4 beta suggest Apple will support more workouts

Vjeran Pavic

Apple’s planning to release WatchOS 4 to Apple Watch wearers in the near future, and up until now, we haven’t heard much about how workouts will change. Today, however, iHelpBR says it’s discovered a host of new icons that it thinks indicate support for a wider variety of workouts.

The icons depict the following activities: badminton, barre, baseball, step training, surfing, sailing, skating, snow sports, pilates, paddle sports, kickboxing, jump rope, lacrosse, stretching, functional strength training, golf, fishing, fencing, equestrian sports, downhill skiing, dance, curling, cross training, cricket, cross-country skiing, core training, bowling, boxing, and climbing.

This is what some of the icons look like, but head over to iHelp BR if you want to see them all.

iHelp BGR

Users can already select workouts from the watch’s workout app, including outdoor walk, elliptical, and open water swim. They could also already define their own workout through the “other” tab by simply naming the activity they’re doing, which lets them revisit it later. Some of these new icons are already included under other, like badminton and barre, although the watch doesn’t actually track those specific activities, it just saves the workouts that way.

However, these new icons could suggest “official” support both in terms of tracking and through visual representation. Given that WatchOS 4 will ship with a new interface for workouts, we’ll likely see these icons used there.

The Next ‘Big Thing’ For Apple Isn’t The iPhone 8; Its AR Powered Smart Glasses Believes Bernstein Research

If there’s one company that’s always on everyone’s mind in the gadget world, it’s Apple. Whether it’s the company’s dedicated fan base, or its critics, folks are always wondering what exactly is Cupertino up to. And it isn’t much, if we take a look at recent years. While the iPhone lineup has upgraded incrementally, the wait for ‘game changing’ features continues. And while a lot of folks expected the Apple Watch to be a success, it continues to operate just like a fad should. However, Apple just might have stumbled on the next big thing. Take a look below to find out more.

AR Based Smartglasses Just Might Be Apple’s Next Big Thing; Even Toni Sacconaghi At Bernstein Securities Believes So

If you take a look at Apple’s history, particularly after Steve Jobs’ return in the late 90s, a few things are consistent. The first of these is a relentless focus on minimalist aesthetics, courtesy of the Jobs-Ivy partnership. The second, is patience. Apple doesn’t like to rush into new markets.

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The iPod’s launch is the strongest demonstration of this fact. Cupertino patiently waited until other companies’ music players had proliferated markets sufficiently. It then analyzed what made these players a success and a failure. Then, only after it’d discovered Toshiba’s storage modules, did the original iPod become ready for launch.

The same is the case for Cupertino’s last ‘big thing’ – the iPad. Apple waited and analyzed what made the then current portable PCs hit and miss. It then introduced the iPad, in a sleek form factor and an easy to use interface. The gadget became instantly popular – with some enthusiasts going as far as to claim that it’ll beat the iPhone.

Now, the next big thing for Apple just might be smart glasses. If there’s one thing that the Apple Watch and all the other smart watches out there tell us, it’s that the wearable market does have potential. But only for standalone gadgets. And if you look at the smart glass market closely, it follows exactly in the footsteps of other markets that Apple has been able to ‘disrupt’ by being a late entrant.

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Tim Sacconaghi at Bernstein shares similar beliefs, especially due to Tim Cook’s particular enthusiasm towards VR. Given that its hard to get Cook enthusiastic in public about anything, this is a big signal in itself. He highlights Apple’s VR acquisitions over the past couple of years to further bolster the argument. Finally, reiterating our sentiments, Sacconaghi states,

Instead, it is evident that most players remain content to fiddle with prototype and beta products, which are still years away from commercial viability. We believe this state of persistent fragmentation provides a potential opening for Apple. Given the relative infancy of AR, Apple does not seem to be behind any of its competitors from a technological perspective: ARKit appears to be just as capable as any other solution within the AR space.

These developments in AR won’t mature on the iPhone 8. Rather, according to Sacconaghi, the tech will mature over the next 3-4 years, when it can be integrated in a standalone product. Of course, launching it on the iPhone will give Apple a significant headway into apps and content – a segment that’ll be ripe for exploitation by smart glasses.

Finally, he concludes by noting, “from a business perspective, smartglasses would make sense to Apple for three reasons,” those being a “potential market” that “is very significant,” the ability of Apple to plow a lot of money into refining the technology, and a follow-on market for “smartglasses software / services” that “could also be substantial.”

Thoughts? Let us know what you think in the comments section below and stay tuned. We’ll keep you updated on the latest.

Source: Barrons

The Apple Watch could soon let you work out in lots more ways

Some clever analysis of the iOS 11 beta code has already shed light on a few of Apple’s secrets, and now there’s something new to report: a series of new workout activity types for the Apple Watch, including equestrian sports, kickboxing, fishing and more besides.

Those activity types correspond to a new set of graphics found by Apple site iHelp BR, but while these icons and titles do show up in the iOS 11 beta, they’re nowhere to be seen in the watchOS 4 beta, suggesting they’re going to be options you can select on the iPhone app rather than on the Apple Watch itself.

The discovery comes as the speculation about an Apple Watch Series 3intensifies: some industry observers are expecting an upgraded wearable to make an appearance next month alongside iPhone 8, iPhone 7S and iPhone 7S Plus devices.

Choose your own activity

While we’re impressed by the digging done by iHelp BR, right now it’s not clear whether these activities can only be logged by the upcoming Apple Watch or by any versions of the device, nor is it certain whether the wearable will be able to track these workouts automatically or leave you to enter them manually.

Whatever the truth about the details of how this gets implemented, it looks like plenty more exercise types are coming to at least one of the Apple Watch models in the near future, making for a more accurate tracking experience (Google Fit is well known for having dozens of activity types available).

The list of new workouts is extensive, and also covers pilates, skiing, sailing, cricket, dancing, surfing, fencing, lacrosse, badminton, baseball, golf, rope jumping, core training and strength training.

• Here’s more evidence the Apple Watch 3 could launch later this year

Via AppleInsider