A mixtape. A VHS tape. An Apple II rendered with love. These setbacks of the 1980s and more are at the heart of For all mankind: Time Capsule, a new augmented reality app developed entirely by Apple to help fans of its alternate history drama catch up on the crucial backstory before the start of the second season next week.
Augmented reality connections are not uncommon, but Time capsule it’s fascinating for a few reasons. On the one hand, it serves as a surprisingly useful narrative tool for one of the most complex programs on the Apple TV +. The series begins with a Russian cosmonaut taking humanity’s first steps on the moon in 1969, defeating American rivals in less than two weeks. From there, the remaining ten episodes explore the personal, political and scientific ramifications of America’s second place, and don’t worry – we’re not going to screw things up here. That said, the second season starts ten full years in that fictional future, which left many plot points and bits of character development for the app to explore.
At the Time capsule, users progress through a series of moments driven by the character centered on augmented reality objects. The mixtape mentioned earlier, for example, is a collection of classics from the 70s curated by one character and delivered to another. And the Apple II? It is used to display “D Mail” sent between characters years before e-mail became widely used in our universe. (At the For all mankind parallel, investment in NASA never waned after a series of successful landings in the United States on the Moon, so personal technology was developed and matured at a much faster rate.)
For series creator and executive producer Ron Moore, embracing augmented reality was an obvious choice – the difficulty was in figuring out what role it should play.
“We’ve been talking about having an AR component on the show since the first season,” he told Engadget in an interview. “I think it took a while to figure out what was the proper way to use it on the show, so the idea of using it as a filler between the years of the two seasons was something that developed later.”
The way it is, Time capsule it looks a lot like bonus material; a way of spying on parts of a story that has not been told because of time or production restrictions. And that is how this type of project will continue, said Moore, until consumers are ready to embrace RA on a scale large enough.
“It’s nice to be able to give the audience a kind of ‘complete meal’, and I could see that, as I continue to do projects, that can be a fun component of that,” he added, noting that AR can become part of the the “creative conversation” from the earliest stages of production.
In addition to the obvious narrative value, however, For all mankind: Time Capsule it is notable because of who did it. Instead of outsourcing the application to an outside developer, Apple created the application end-to-end with support from the program’s writing team, marking a significant first step in AR content for the company. Apple has spent years developing tools to help app developers create their own smart augmented reality experiences, but so far, their own efforts have been relatively meager – think of AR Easter eggs in event announcements and an app that lets you measure real world objects.
The fact that Apple is working on complementary AR content for its streaming programs is no surprise – Bloomberg released the plans last year, noting that Apple had originally planned this kind of auxiliary content to launch in 2020 before postponing it as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. With that in mind, Apple’s approach here is a little different than what Bloomberg’s suggested story. Instead of acting as a live companion to a program being watched in real time, Time capsule it’s a totally independent experience – which can be completed in about 45 minutes if you’re in a hurry, and which will remain static as the season unfolds. Apple also declined to go into details when asked whether building AR content around its high-level streaming programs would become standard practice, so it is unclear how many other AR initiatives the company has undertaken, or whether they will get closer to the concept Bloomberg described.
Still, it is not difficult to have hope for what may come next. A steady stream of rumors and reports continues to suggest that Apple is working hard on a mixed reality headset behind closed doors, and news from Time Capsule The launch is the clearest sign that the company is exploring a potential role as an AR content provider, not just a platform administrator.