I, too, have this question. I would like to develop an application that will offer anchors within the mapped regions, but do not live within one of those mapped regions for testing. It would be great to be able to use ARGeoTracking for debug purposes without localizing, just for the sake of testing code and ensure it itself is running normally.
@Deanpankhurst, you presumably could use CoreLocation and ARKit on their own to provide similar functionality to what ARGeoTracking offers, wherein you set up a sort of geofence to determine when a user is within a specific geolocation based or longitude/latitude coordinates and a radius within it, that use an ARWorldTrackingConfiguration to locate a plane and add an AR object.
As you stated, you'd never hit the same level of precision as one does with ARGeoTracking, though if you wanted to go further (this is what I was trying before ARGeoTracking was announced), you could go out and photograph the location yourself, train an image recognition (or object recognition) model in CreateML, then bring that into your app. That way, you could use the user's geolocation to get a general idea of their location, then perform analysis to determine if their camera feed sees a point of interest that you've photographed for your model, and even go further as to convert the bounding box around your point of interest to AR coordinates, and anchor your AR object to the detected model.
As stated in the WWDC session, ARGeoTracking will become available in more places throughout the summer.
