Peter Jackson's new Wingnut AR studio shows off its first game demo at WWDC 2017

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson's new augmented reality studio Wingnut AR unveiled a table-top AR experience at Apple's Worldwide Development Conference in San Jose, California, on Monday (5 June). The experience will eventually become the New Zealand-based studio's first game.

In a brief on-stage demonstration, Wingnut AR creative direct or Alasdair Coull showed off a new AR experience that the studio is currently working on in which players will use an iOS device to view a small but remote town set on a real-life table.

Coull said the entire scene was created using Apple's upcoming augmented reality developer kit - ARKit - and Epic Games' Unreal Engine. Within a minute, airships are seen flying in to attack the tiny outpost.

"What's really cool here is with the ARKit's tracking, you can get in really close to choose how you view the action," Coull explained.

"It's like you're the director of your own experience," he said as raiders make their way in over the town and one of the AI characters flees and jumps off of the real-world table to fall to his death.

"Wouldn't it be cool to have airship battles in your own living room?" Alasdair said as the attacks ensue.

Coull did not reveal any other details about the new game such as its title, content or specific release date. He did note that the company will be releasing an AR product on Apple's App Store later this year.

Touting it as the "largest AR platform in the world", Apple's new ARKit developer platform will provide advanced AR capabilities on iOS and supports Unreal Engine, Unity and Scenekit. ARkit is due to release later this year with iOS 11 and will be available on iPads and iPhones.

"The ARKit enables hundreds of millions of people to draw experiences like this opens up so many possibilities," he said. "I think it's a real game-changer."