Reality Editor, an iOS app developed by MIT researchers, lets you connect smart objects by drawing lines between them via an augmented reality interface
Context & Ripple Effects
When MIT's Media Lab researchers shipped Reality Editor, smartphone AR barely existed as a consumer capability — the app's premise was that you should be able to point a camera at a smart object and wire its behavior to another one by drawing a line in space. It was a research demo of spatial programming ahead of any mainstream platform to run on.
The related coverage traces exactly the pipeline that idea needed: Apple's ARKit release turned the iPhone camera into a real-time AR surface for every developer, ARKit 3 added occlusion and no-code tooling with Reality Composer, Adobe's Aero brought code-free AR authoring to designers, and Epic's free RealityScan made phone-based object capture routine. By the time Apple's AR executives framed phones and tablets as world-mapping, object-scanning tools laying the groundwork for headsets, the interaction Reality Editor sketched — manipulating the physical world through an AR layer — had become an industry build-out rather than a lab experiment.
First-order effects
- Smart-home owners get a first working answer to the field's core usability complaint — configuring connected devices through per-app menus — by treating physical objects themselves as the interface.
Second-order effects
- Platform owners see the demand signal: once ARKit ships, Apple converts what was a bespoke MIT prototype into default OS capability, and no-code tools like Reality Composer and Aero move AR authoring from engineers to designers.
Third-order effects
- If phones keep doubling as world-mappers and object scanners, the endpoint is headset-era computing where the primary way to configure or command an environment is spatially, through the objects in it — with whoever owns the AR runtime owning the control layer for the Internet of Things.
The trend: Augmented reality has evolved from research prototypes like Reality Editor into platform-level infrastructure, with phone-based mapping and no-code authoring building toward headset-native interfaces for the physical world.