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Augmented reality

Placing a product in the room, and which devices can.

The VUE teamLast updated

What it does

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.

Which devices can

DeviceBehaviour
iPhone and iPadOpens in Quick Look, Apple’s built-in AR viewer. Nothing to install.
AndroidOpens in Scene Viewer on devices with Google Play Services for AR. Nothing to install on a supported device.
DesktopShows 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.

What desktop visitors see

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.

Scale, and why it matters

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.

Turning it on

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.

When it will not launch

  • Nothing happens on tapping. Usually an unsupported device, or an Android without Google Play Services for AR. The viewer says so rather than failing silently.
  • The sheet opens but places nothing. Historically this was a fault in how VUE prepared textured models for Quick Look, and it is fixed. If you see it, tell us which model and which device — that combination is what we need.
  • The product is the wrong size. Almost always the units in the source file. See above.
  • It works on the share link but not on your page. Check the embedding page is served over HTTPS. Camera access is not granted to an insecure page, so AR cannot start from one.
Screenshot to addA phone showing a radiator placed against a real wall through Quick Look.