Augmented Reality (AR) seems to be the new hotness in game development, enabling applications to mix the real world and their game worlds together. PlayCanvas, a 3D HTML5 powered game engine we reviewed here as well as a more recent tutorial series here, just added AR support. Built over top of the ARToolkit, PlayCanvasAR is described as:
PlayCanvasAR makes it easy to build lightning fast augmented reality applications. With it, you can construct web-based AR applications with zero programming using the PlayCanvas Editor. Just drag in your 3D models and watch them appear in AR!
With the following features:
- Amazing Performance – PlayCanvasAR delivers 60 frames per second, even on mobile.
- Marker-based Tracking – PlayCanvasAR utilizes the amazing ARToolkit, an open source marker-based tracking library. Originally coded in C++, it has been ported to JavaScript using Emscripten.
- Incredible Visuals – PlayCanvas provides an advanced WebGL graphics engine. It supports the latest WebGL 2 graphics API and implements Physically Based Rendering to achieve incredible visuals for your AR applications. And yes, that’s open sourced too.
The following browsers are currently supported:
- Android 4.0+ (Chrome 21+)
- iOS 11+ (Safari 11+, Chrome 21+, Firefox 17+)
- Windows XP+ (Chrome 21+, Firefox 17+, Opera 18+, Edge 12+)
- macOS (Safari 11+, Chrome 21+, Firefox 17+, Opera 18+)
- Linux (Chrome 21+, Firefox 17+, Opera 18+)
PlayCanvasAr is available here. You can see the new AR functionality in action in the video below: