AR Studio: Create and Distribute New, Rich AR Experiences with Ease
At last year’s F8 we introduced developers and artists to AR Studio, a powerful tool designed to make stunning interactive experiences for the Facebook camera. Since then we’ve seen the creation of immersive, interactive 3D experiences that allow us to enhance ourselves and the world around us, bringing imaginative augmented reality ideas to life. Today, we’re excited to announce a new version of AR Studio that provides easier creation, new capabilities, and wider distribution.
Create with Ease
With AR Studio, anyone can be a creator – our tools are easy-to-use and accessible. Now with our visual programming capabilities, you can drag-and-drop custom animations, interactions and logic into your scene without writing a line of JavaScript.
Also, you’re no longer blocked by the complexity and challenges of complicated 3D design tools. We’re introducing a new partnership with Sketchfab. With this integration coming soon, you can now search a library of downloadable models right in AR Studio and add them directly to your projects. In the near future, you’ll be able to add your own custom libraries to AR Studio with a simple JS library API.
Explore New Tools and Capabilities
We’re also launching new tools and capabilities to help you make more rich, relevant, and contextually-aware AR experiences:
- Tracking: Use AR Target Tracker, Body Tracking (coming soon), Hand Tracking (coming soon), High-Fidelity Face Tracking, and more to follow movement and tie it to your experience
- Patch Editor: Control audio, manipulate materials, add interactions, and even create your own shaders without writing a single line of code
- Free-to-use assets: Add ready-made sound files from Facebook’s free library and 3D models through our partnership with Sketchfab
- Background Segmentation: Separate people from their background, create experiences that transport people to different places
- Location AR: Tie your AR effects to places in the real world, making pre-determined experiences available when people get to a certain location
- Semantic Scene Understanding: Create experiences that are contextually aware, like having heat waves rise up when a coffee cup is recognized in the scene
- Analytics for AR effects published by Facebook Pages (coming soon): Track the reach and engagement of your Page's published AR experience by measuring impressions, captures, and shares
- 3D Posts in Camera: Take a 3D post from News Feed and experience it in your world with Facebook Camera on your mobile device
Distribute Your AR Content in New Ways
In addition, we’re expanding camera effects beyond the Facebook app, so you can distribute your content to more people across new surfaces including Instagram, Messenger and Facebook Lite. This experience is launching now in closed beta on Instagram and Messenger, and coming soon for everyone using Facebook Lite. With these new surfaces, you can connect with a larger audience and share your experiences with people around the world – wherever they are.
Create with Us
We’re excited to make these new features available to our ecosystem, and we can’t wait to see the amazing experiences you create. No matter your background or skillset, if you have an augmented reality idea, you can bring it to life and share it with the 1.5 billion people with AR capable devices on Facebook.
To start building with us, visit https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-studio.
