AR Onboarding

Generally, onboarding new users onto an AR app a big ask – we're asking the user to:

Download an app of considerable size from the App Store/Play Store, probably on a mobile connection. AR apps typically package in bulky SDKs, 3D models, and other asset files, so this could be a big bundle. Give permission to access the device's camera. If the user accidentally denies permission, they have to go through additional steps of approving manually. iOS will not display the alert again, so the user is forced to go into the Settings app to change this. Android is a little more forgiving and will allow you to ask multiple times in-app. Dive into the experience. The user might not have intuition about what to do. They might not even know what AR is. How do we make this experience frictionless straight off the bat?

In order to ensure that this entire process goes smoothly, it's worth thinking about how you might design the onboarding experience, because it's something that can make or break the app. Typically, when they start the app, users need to know what they have to do to get to the experience with minimal oversight. It's common to have some sort of animation to tell the user to calibrate the camera to their surroundings as this is what AR SDKs require before anything else can happen.

A typical flow for an AR app that allows the user to project a 3D model in world space might look like: