Our mission at Viro Media is to enable AR and VR everywhere. With the Viro platform, developers can rapidly build AR and VR applications. To showcase the power of the platform we built and released our own app: Figment AR (iOS | Android).

Since launching Figment AR, the response has been amazing. Figment AR was voted #1 product of the day on Product Hunt, nominated as a finalist for the 2018 Google Play Awards under Best AR/VR Experience, and named Best AR App for Classrooms. Whether it’s college students sharing playful videos of animated 3D emoji, filmmakers adding special effects to their shots, or teachers inspiring students by transporting them through AR portals, customers are finding all kinds of uses for Figment.

While there are an abundance of tools and sample code to build nearly any mobile app, AR development is still in its early stages. Developing for any new platform can be daunting and high quality foundational code can make the transition much easier. So to help others build great AR experiences, we are open sourcing Figment AR. Figment AR was built using React Native and Viro React. It is a single codebase that runs on both iOS and Android, enabling fast cross-platform development.

Figment AR on Github

What is Figment AR?

Figment AR turns the world into an augmented funhouse. Users can create imaginative scenes out of the world around them by adding interactive emoji, animals and other playful objects to your surroundings, creating “portals” to step into another dimension, and adding environmental effects like snow, fireworks and more. Users can record and share these moments with friends to bring the figments of their imagination to life.

What can I build with Figment AR?

There are no limits to what you can build with the Viro platform. We are providing the Figment codebase to give developers a solid foundation on which to build their own applications. You can extend the Figment AR code and build a better app or you can use the Figment code to add AR as a feature into your existing app.

In addition to showcasing many AR features, the Figment code showcases how to:

Bridges 2D UI with 3D AR scenes Utilizes gestures for object manipulation, Work seamlessly with existing native libraries.

Lastly, all of Figment’s assets (2D UI, 3D objects, portal frames, etc) are included in the code base. AR development oftentimes is stymied by a lack of assets. The assets included in Figment can help you get started building your own AR experiences.

What‘s Next?

Start building your AR application today with Viro, and use Figment AR to help bootstrap it. The Viro platform is free with no limits on distribution, and you can get helpful support from our community by joining the Viro Developer Slack.

We will be publishing additional posts over the next couple weeks that dive deeper into specific parts of the codebase. Follow us on Medium or Twitter to stay up to date. We are super excited to see the great AR experiences you build with Viro and Figment AR.