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ARKive

Sharing AR experiences, made possible.

The problem ARKive solves

ARKive enables sharing of AR experiences with other people around the world.
Similar to how people share photos, videos and other files on chat messengers including zulip, whatsapp and others, ARKive makes it possible to share cool AR experiences as easily as that.

This seemingly simple concept of technology which is analogous to sharing any kind of file format doesn't exists right now.
The reason for this is that Augmented reality isn't, unlike photos which may be jpeg or vides which may by mp4, augmented reality is a technology and not a file type.

Challenges we ran into

Main hurdles-

  1. AR is a tech and not a file, sharing of an AR experience is complex.
  2. Integrating support in Zulip.
  3. Sharing and previewing AR experiences through chat messenger.
  4. Sharing AR experiences while limiting their memory size.

To make sharing of an AR experience possible in a way that every person in the world can experience that same experience locally to augmented the reality around the person, we built technologies that shares only the AR object and not the entire experience. After sharing of the AR object, the experience is built from ground up from the reciever's end to conserve memory and give a localised AR experience specific to the person.
We vision that this technology will make sharing of AR experiences on messaging platforms standardized similar to photos and videos.
To make ARKive technology generic so that it can support every platform, we share the links for the AR object on a separate storage server through that chat messenger. This overcomes the problem of unsupported file types and optimises memory usage.

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