Introducing App Clips: Supercharge Your WebAR Experiences with ARKit & ARCore 🚀

Hello Mattercraft community!

We're thrilled to announce the latest addition to Mattercraft: App Clips! This powerful new feature takes your WebAR experiences to the next level by leveraging Zappar's App Clip (iOS) and Instant App (Android) technology, delivering premium AR world tracking capabilities without requiring users to download a dedicated app.

What are app clips?

App Clips transform your WebAR experiences by providing:

High quality world tracking, leveraging the full hardware and built-in AR technologies of the device (such as ARKit and ARCore)

Improved user experience (versus the web browser) including full screen, wake lock and rotation lock

Optimised permissions dialog user flows

Simpler and more consistent ability to play media, including audio and video

Try it out

Scan the QR code below to try an experience built with Mattercraft and App Clip enabled:

Examples

With App Clips, it's now possible to build and create WebAR experiences for a vast number of use cases. Check out these demos of content built in Mattercraft and launched with App Clips:

Portals

Create stunning digital environments you can place and walk around. With App Clips making use of ARKit and ARCore, there's no need for the initial anchor position to always be in the camera view, allowing for larger, portal type experiences.

Product Visualisations

Place products in your real world environment, at real world scale to showcase digital products in your users space.

VPS with Immersal 

Use the Immersal integration within Mattercraft to overlay and track digital content to real world scans.

Extended Tracking

Go further by using image and extended tracking. When images are out of view, you can use world tracking as a fallback so the digital content stays in position.

Mini Games

With App Clips, you have access to the full suite of features and functionality within Mattercraft. This makes it possible to build AR mini-games, such as a physics-based Jenga game (as seen below).

How to use App Clips

The amazing thing about App Clips is that they work seamlessly with both existing and new projects. If you already have a world tracked project created, you can follow the "existing projects" steps to supercharge the world tracking stability.

New projects

1. Open Mattercraft and select any world tracking template

2. When previewing, enable App Clips on your preview QR code

3. When publishing, you'll be prompted to update your triggers (if they are not already App Clip enabled), so make sure the App Clips option is checked!

Existing projects

1. Ensure you're using version 3.5.0 or later of the @zcomponent/zappar-three package (you can find this in the dependencies browser, in the left hand menu of Mattercraft)

2. Set up your triggers to launch with App Clips through your project settings (see next section for information on how to set up triggers for App Clips).

App Clip Triggers

You can also enable/disable App Clip support on your triggers from the main project overview page on your workspace, as seen below:

Custom Branding

Additional branding options, plus integrating and deploying App Clips through your own apps are available. These features are costed separately, so please get in touch with us to learn more if you're interested in customising your solution.

Get Started Today!

Whether you're creating immersive portals, product visualisations, or interactive games, App Clips open up new possibilities for your WebAR projects. Start building today and keep an eye on our "What's New" section for more exciting updates coming soon!

Thank you for being part of the Mattercraft journey! Your feedback continues to inspire us, and we can't wait to see the incredible immersive experiences you bring to life with App Clips!