A 3D phone scanner is coming to AR Works: scan real objects into your AR scene

Right now, if you want a 3D model in your AR Works scene, you have two options. You either build the model yourself in a 3D program, or you find one in an asset library and hope it is close enough to what you had in mind. Both work, but neither helps much when the thing you want in your scene is a real, specific object sitting on the desk in front of you.

We have been working on a third option, and it turns the phone in your pocket into a 3D scanner: point it at the object and scan it. A version of this is already here on the desktop, and the phone scanner for the web editor is coming next.

Your phone becomes a 3D scanner

The idea is simple. You walk around an object with your phone camera and take a series of photos from different angles, top to bottom and all the way around. Those photos go off to be processed, and what comes back is a textured 3D model of that exact object, ready to drop into a scene like any other asset. That is the whole 3D phone scanner: no rig, no special hardware, just the camera you already carry.

There is no separate app to download. The capture happens through the phone, and the finished model lands in your project next to your imported files. From there it behaves like any other model you would bring in. You can move it, scale it, animate it, wire it up with logic nodes, and place it in either an image-tracked or a world-tracked scene.

Already here on desktop: a built-in photogrammetry tool

If you would rather not wait for the phone scanner, there is a version you can use today. The desktop edition of AR Works has a photogrammetry tool built in, available to Pro and Education users. You give it a set of photos of an object taken from every side, and it reconstructs them into a textured 3D model you can drop straight into a scene.

The best part is where the work happens. The desktop scanner runs entirely on your own computer, so your photos never leave the machine and you are not waiting on a server to finish. For a school on a locked-down network, or anyone who would rather keep their captures local, that is worth a lot. The phone scanner coming to the web editor takes the same photogrammetry and makes the capture as easy as walking around the object with your phone.

Why we think designers will want this

A lot of AR work is about one particular object. A product a shop actually sells. A prop from a school play. An artefact in a museum case. A dish on a menu. Modelling those from scratch is slow, and a generic stock model is rarely the real thing. Scanning skips both problems. You photograph the actual object, and before long you are placing the actual object in your scene.

It also lowers the bar. You do not need to know how to model in 3D to get a decent asset. If you can take a careful set of photos, you can get something usable, which is the whole point of AR Works: build real AR without needing to be a 3D programmer first.

We are trialling it in restaurants first

Before we bring the phone scanner to more people, we wanted to test it somewhere demanding, so we are running an early trial with a handful of restaurants.

Food turned out to be a good, hard test. Plates are awkward shapes, some surfaces are glossy or wet, and a portion looks different under different lighting. Restaurants also have a clear reason to care: a guest can point a phone at a menu and see the actual dish appear on the table before they order, rather than guessing from a line of description. Getting that to look right on a phone, from a scan taken in a busy dining room, tells us a lot about what the feature needs before a wider release.

We are learning practical things from it. How many photos are enough. How much light helps. Which objects scan cleanly and which ones fight back. That last part is worth being honest about.

What scans well, and what does not

Scanning works best on objects with a bit of surface texture and a matte finish, held still under even light. Think ceramics, food, tools, toys, most everyday things.

It struggles with the surfaces that also confuse the human eye: clear glass, mirrors, chrome, and anything thin or shiny. Those are hard for every 3D scanner, not just ours, so if your object is a wine glass or a polished trophy, expect to do some cleanup or reach for a modelled version instead. We would rather tell you that up front than have you fight a bad scan.

Part of a tool built to be easy to work with

AR Works is a browser-based AR development tool, and scanning pulls in the same direction as the rest of it. We want it to be one of the easiest AR development tools to actually build with, and most of our work goes into making the hard parts feel ordinary. The editor runs in your browser, so there is nothing to install and nothing to configure to get started, and the pieces that usually need a developer, tracking, animation, materials and interactivity, are handled with a visual editor and drag-and-drop logic instead of code.

The other half of that is reach. What you build opens on recent iPhones and Android phones straight from a link or a QR code, with no app for anyone to install, and the same projects open in the desktop editor too. You make something once, and almost anyone can view it on the phone already in their pocket. Adding a photogrammetry scanner to that means the models in your scenes can come from the real world just as easily as the finished experience reaches real people.

Who gets it, and when

Scanning is a Pro and Education feature. The photogrammetry tool is in the desktop app for those plans today, and the 3D phone scanner is in an early trial now and rolling out to Pro and Education accounts soon, inside the same browser-based editor you already use.

You do not have to wait to try AR Works, though. The editor is free to start with, so you can create an account and build a real scene today, then move up to Pro when you want the scanner. Schools can talk to us about Education access.

Looking further ahead

Phones are where AR lives today, but they are not the whole story. AR glasses are coming, and building apps for them is on our roadmap. We are not ready to show it yet, so take this as a teaser rather than a date, but the goal is the same as it is on phones: make building for AR something a designer can do without a specialist team behind them. The phone scanner is simply the next piece out of the door.

For now, you can already import your own 3D models on any plan, so your scenes do not have to wait for the scanner to arrive.