FITC

Overview

When we think of AR, we think of deeply immersive, highly visual, world-locked 6DoF experiences that run smoothly on a high-end device with a fully charged battery and a fast internet connection. Prior to this year, Lens was only available for high-end smartphones equipped with AR technology frameworks, this year, we scaled the Lens experience to devices that cost as low as $35, compressing the experience down to ~200KB, and returns results on-device with low latency. Learn about how Lens scaled a focused AR experience to low-end devices, the challenges that came with the user, network, and device constraints, and how the team worked around to solve these problems for a magical and useful product in emerging markets.

Objective

AR experiences are not only for users with the highest end smartphones or exploratory front-camera experiences, AR can provide answers directly in the environment, can be built on lower-end devices with low quality camera resolutions and even to devices without AR frameworks, and make the camera a powerful tool in everyday life for everyone.

Target Audience

Open to everyone

Five Things Audience Members Will Learn

1. Showing the user a composited view of the environment with useful information paired with audio is augmenting the user’s reality in a useful way
2. AR experiences are not only for users with the highest end smartphones with the ARCore and ARKit capabilities
3. With a simple interface and delightful experience, a combination of different machine learning technology, and most importantly a deep understanding of users – the phone camera can be a powerful productivity and learning tool
4. The phone camera is something users across all income levels can intuitively understand
5. Designing AR experiences is hard, but designing delightful AR experiences with a lot of latency, a low quality camera, and for low functional and digital literacy users comes with a whole new set of challenges