The massive reach and frictionless experience you know and love about 8th Wall WebAR just got even better! With the new iOS 14.3 update, which brings camera access to WKWebView, your WebAR experiences now work in all major iOS apps, including Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Messenger, LinkedIn, and Chrome — increasing your discovery and reach to the 728 million iPhone users worldwide.
Augmented reality is a powerful technology which uses our own reality as a canvas to transform everyday places, faces and things into something new and extraordinary. With Image Target augmented reality, the physical image marker — such as a magazine page, poster or label — is an essential ingredient to bring your product to life, making it the subject in an AR experience. World Tracking augmented reality uses the surfaces around you to create a markerless experience anywhere you are. When these two powerful AR technologies are combined, it’s possible to create WebAR experiences which make use of the world and keep your product as the focal point.
UPDATE 4/2/2021: Live Learning sessions are now held every other Wednesday on a recurring basis. You only need to sign up once here for the schedule, and can use the same link to access each session.
You can view past Live Learning sessions here
We look forward to your questions and suggestions!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
We are extremely pleased to announce the launch of 8th Wall Curved Image Targets, providing developers with new tools to bring to life coffee cups, bottles, cans and more using web-based augmented reality (WebAR).
Curved Image Targets expand upon our existing WebAR image target capabilities which previously was designed for flat image targets only. With the rollout of Release 15 of our AR Engine, developers can now create WebAR projects that are activated by and track images wrapped around cylinder- and cone-shaped objects.
Depthkit Cinema software allows you to capture high resolution volumetric videos from anywhere. When paired with 8th Wall, you can create a WebAR experience that works on all devices, no app needed. Here’s how:
Today we are excited to announce the release of our Video Recording feature which can be added to any 8th Wall project to let your users capture and share their experience.
When you add Video Recording to your project, your users will be able to capture moments within the WebAR experience and have the option to download their media and/or share it with their friends using the most popular messaging and social media applications. This opens up viral marketing opportunities for your experience by equipping your users with the tools they need to share their experience with their network and inspire further use.
8th Wall Video Recording happens in-browser and on-device, supporting iOS, Android, and Desktop computers. Designed with privacy in mind, capturing video on-device not only makes recording of web content extremely fast but it also ensures that only the user has access to the media they have created.
Augmented reality offers a brand new way for people to engage with digital content. This type of engagement is dramatically different from the views and clicks we are used to today; but this should come as no surprise seeing AR represents a massive leap in dimension — moving the digital experience from 2D to 3D. Whereas in a 2D digital world we may parse information from an image or video as a quite passive and unremarkable interaction, in a 3D world we are asked to be an active participant, fully present to live out an experience that is meaningful and can be quite extraordinary.
Augmented reality is a brand new medium, an experience medium. And a new medium demands new ways to think about it including how to measure its effectiveness in delivering a message.
But what are the metrics we should use to measure an AR experience?
As life is a sequence of experiences, it stands to reason that a good place to glean insights into how to to measure an AR experience is to look at what metrics we value when we evaluate our real life ones.
Let’s imagine I just got back from a trip to Toronto and am now on the phone with a friend. Some of the most common questions I would get would be:
These same questions apply to an AR experience.
Augmented reality requires users to be present in the experience. AR asks users to stop what they are doing in the real world, and fully enter an experience in a new augmented one. In this way, they are required to dedicate time to fully focus on the AR experience and be completely immersed in that moment. This results in high-quality dwell time in AR. Of course, your user will remain engaged within your augmented reality experience as long as you are keeping their attention, so getting your user into the meat of your experience as fast as possible and keeping them engaged by giving them meaningful things to do will be essential.
As AR is in 3D, users automatically become active participants in the experience. In AR, users must move about and interact with the space you’ve created to do anything from trying on virtual accessories to building new worlds. Just like in real reality, augmented reality makes engagement a mandatory requirement. As such, it will be critical for you to design your experience to ensure that your user engages in a manner that aligns well with your goals. AR user flows may not be linear, however, as your user has more agency than 2D digital experiences and so listening for places your user may be stuck and finding ways to encourage them to interact with your critical user paths and CTAs will be essential.
Our memories are shaped by our experiences. With AR users fully present and interacting within an augmented world, their recall of the experience should be just as vivid. This makes it even more critical to pay attention to every detail designed in your AR experience to ensure that the memories that could be created are ones you wish to have represent your brand and product goals. As most memories today are shared on social media, listening for mentions of your experience on these networks in addition to polling users post-experience are great ways to measure this metric.
In addition to being able to recount what they saw and what they did, like all great experiences, a large part of your user’s memory will be around how they felt while inside your augmented reality. Therefore it is also critical to design an experience which not only evokes an emotional state while engaging in your augmented reality, but also leaves them with this lingering sentiment when they return to our real reality. To capture this, consider implementing an easy rating system which pops up at natural times within the experience or follow-up with a survey when the user is back in the real world.
Of course, measurement of an AR experience should center around the goals set at the beginning of the project. Once your goals are set and the experience is live, it is time to measure.
Building with the 8th Wall WebAR development platform makes it easy and effective for you to measure your AR experiences. Our modular framework was designed to integrate with external libraries such as your preferred analytics solution.
To help you get started with measuring your experiences, we have recently updated our documentation with a new section on “Advanced Analytics,” beginning with outlining how to integrate Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager in your WebAR projects.
If you are already an 8th Wall developer you can learn how to add Advanced Analytics to your project by heading on over to our docs. To get started developing with 8th Wall, sign up for a 14-day free trial here.
🙌 A big thank you to our developer community for consistently providing us with helpful insights and critiques on our software. We’re continuing to develop and iterate based on the valuable feedback that you provide us.
Holograms are in high demand as brands and organizations turn to volumetric captures of actors, celebrities and spokespeople to entertain, educate, train, and sell to customers. When combined with WebAR, these holograms become free to be wherever the user is, including their home.
Back in October, we launched our integration with Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studios (MRCS) to support streaming of its volumetric video in augmented reality on the web. Combining Microsoft’s high-resolution, low-latency volumetric videos with 8th Wall’s scalable and frictionless WebAR platform has unlocked a massive market opportunity for holograms. Since this launch, the 8th Wall platform has been used by brands, agencies and even musicians to create WebAR hologram activations that bring a lifelike human experience directly to users.
We gained some valuable feedback in supporting many of the early developers in their hologram project development. This insight was used to implement some powerful changes to our platform to improve the end-to-end development of MRCS hologram WebAR experiences.
Today, we are debuting our official MRCS Hologram project template and a new Cloud Editor feature enabling asset bundle uploads which makes it possible to add MRCS volumetric video (HCAP) files to your project. The release of these new tools makes the 8th Wall Cloud Editor the best platform to create and publish WebAR MRCS hologram content.
The A-Frame MRCS Project Template kick starts your hologram project development by using the latest versions of Microsoft’s HCAP player and 8th Wall’s SLAM engine hyper-optimized for the browser to provide world tracking. It also includes everything you need to set the hologram’s initial scale, enable gestures for manipulation and movement and easily modify looping, muting, control playback, and display messages based on HCAP playback states.
The new asset bundle feature lets developers drag and drop .ZIP files or complete directories into their Cloud Editor projects. The addition of this feature is critical to supporting MRCS HCAP assets. Developers can now drag and drop HCAP asset bundles into a Cloud Editor project, preview the hologram once it has uploaded and then add it to their project.
When ready, the hologram WebAR project can be published instantly to a password-protected staging environment or live to the world — hosted right at the edge, where your users are, with low latency via 197 points of presence globally.
While MRCS hologram projects benefit greatly from asset bundles, this new feature can also be used to upload files with any file extension, including glTF, and brings support for files that rely on referencing relative path files. It also allows developers to serve files as assets which can improve build and load times.
You can check out the new asset bundle feature by logging into the Cloud Editor and clicking the “+” arrow beside “Assets” in any Cloud Editor project. Or, read more about it in our Documentation.
To get started with a hologram project, head on over to the Project Library to clone the MRCS Hologram project or select it as a project template in the Cloud Editor. MRCS Hologram projects will require you to have a volumetric video file (HCAP) from Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studios (MRCS) or MRCS partners Metastage and Dimension Studio.
We can’t wait to see what you create!
8th Wall has become synonymous with WebAR, powering hundreds of commercial WebAR websites across the world. Our SDK provides instant surface detection, 6DoF world tracking and image target detection to the browser, allowing developers to build and distribute AR without needing to worry about app stores and downloads. Developers use 8th Wall to create web-based AR experiences with greater reach and less friction than comparable standalone apps, while delivering the deep engagement and dwell time that AR provides.
Until now, WebAR has been delivered in the form of microsites: full screen web apps that reside on their own webpage. Over the past year and a half, we have witnessed the complexity of these microsites grow to impressive levels. Real-time multiplayer games, streaming holograms, geo-based scavenger hunts, and much more have elevated this format and proven that web technology is further ahead than most people realize. Now with WebAR in a mature state, I’m proud to announce ‘Inline AR’ as an alternative to the microsite format which can now power even more of the web.
