Placing a product in the room, and which devices can.
A visitor on a phone or tablet taps View in your space, points the camera at the floor or a wall, and the product appears at full size in the room. They can walk around it and see how big it actually is.
The type they are looking at is the type that gets placed, so a visitor who has configured a 1200 mm anthracite radiator places that one.
| Device | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| iPhone and iPad | Opens in Quick Look, Apple’s built-in AR viewer. Nothing to install. |
| Android | Opens in Scene Viewer on devices with Google Play Services for AR. Nothing to install on a supported device. |
| Desktop | Shows a QR code — see below. |
VUE prepares the AR file when it is asked for rather than in advance, so there is nothing to publish and no separate export step.
A desktop browser cannot place anything in a room, so the button shows a QR code instead. Scanning it opens the same model on the visitor’s phone, already in AR.
This is recorded as its own metric, separate from an actual AR launch. The two measure different things: one is a person who placed the product in their room, the other is a person who wanted to and was at a desk. The second number is often the more interesting one.
AR is where a scale error becomes obvious. On screen a model is whatever size the frame makes it, and a unit mistake is invisible. In AR a radiator exported in centimetres instead of millimetres appears ten times too big, in somebody’s living room, on their phone.
Revit families are correct by construction. For FBX and OBJ, export in metres or millimetres and check the result in AR yourself before publishing — it takes thirty seconds and it is the only reliable check.
AR is a plan feature and it is on by default where the plan includes it. Per embed you can choose whether the button appears and which corner it sits in — see embeds and the viewer. If show the controls only on hover is set, the AR button follows that rule on pointer devices and stays visible on touch, which is where it is actually used.
AR on iOS hands the model to Apple's own AR Quick Look, which loads it outside the page. On a very detailed model it can give up quietly: the sheet opens, the camera comes up, and nothing is ever placed. Nothing on the page can detect that — from VUE's side the hand-over succeeded.
It is almost always size, and the cause is unavoidable in the format. AR files are written as text and may not be compressed inside the package, so roughly every triangle costs about seventy-five bytes. Across a real library:
| Model | Triangles | AR file |
|---|---|---|
| A valve | 3,000 | 0.15 MB |
| A boiler | 21,000 | 2.4 MB |
| A moulded chair | 138,000 | 10.4 MB |
| A car | 175,000 | 22.5 MB |
Everything at the small end places instantly. The heavy end is where phones start refusing, and older devices refuse sooner.
What helps. Simplify the family before you upload it — AR is the one place a model's triangle count is felt directly by the customer, and a product seen at arm's length in a room does not need the detail a technical drawing does. Removing internal geometry nobody can see is usually the largest single saving, because it costs bytes without ever being visible.
VUE already reduces image detail automatically on heavy models, since a texture at arm's length does not resolve the way it does filling a desktop screen. It cannot simplify geometry for you — that judgement belongs to the family.
If a model is over the line, the viewer says so after you tap: it still tries, because a newer phone may cope where an older one does not.