There, he will watch the live keynote, collaborate with Apple engineers, and participate in hands-on tech labs.
Liang says while Lake Tekapo (Takapō), home of New Zealand’s only professional research observatory, is renowned for its pristine dark skies, it’s geographically or financially out of reach for many.
To create his stargazing app, Liang travelled to Takapō to capture the iconic Church of the Good Shepherd in 3D using his iPhone’s Lidar (light detection and ranging) pulsed laser scanner.
He then created a 12,500-particle galaxy utilising RealityKit, ARKit, and a custom-built Metal compute shader.
“It’s an immersive stargazing app,” Liang said.
“You can ‘look’ at objects, including the Moon and Matariki. You can drag them toward you by pinching then pulling your hand.”
Alex Liang’s latets app is devised to be used with Apple’s Vision Pro headset. Photo / Getty
The Apple Vision Pro has yet to be released in New Zealand. Liang picked up his headset during a trip to Sydney.
The app provides star lore, such as the significance of Matariki, in te reo Māori, with English translation.
This isn’t Liang’s first time catching Apple’s attention. He has been coding since the age of 5 – initially self-taught alongside guidance from his father – and was recognised as a standard challenge winner in previous years for his educational apps Little Planets and Make The Wish, both made for the iPhone and iPad.
Make The Wish, which Liang donated to Auckland’s Stardome Observatory, helps kids memorise our solar system’s planets.
It was developed with help from Professor Denis Vida from Canada’s Global Meteor Network, which operates more than 1400 meteor cameras across 42 countries, after Liang attended an astronomy conference.
The app uses machine learning (a form of AI) to predict the position of meteor showers, making it possible to photograph them with an iPhone rather than a specialised camera.
Liang said the meteor tracking in Make The Wish and the constellations in his new app would have been impossible to create without the AI and spatial computing tools available today.
Liang credits his father (a software developer, now working on the video side of generative AI) for encouraging him to watch Apple’s WWDC 2020 livestream, including that year’s student winners, for alerting him to the competition and the Swift programming language.
He’s hoping to meet Apple’s outgoing chief executive Tim Cook and top product managers during his trip to Cupertino.
Liang is now in his final year at Westlake, so what next?
“I’ll probably take a gap year and travel the world going to conferences and tech events,” he said.
“I want to work at Apple one day.”
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.