.png)
Welcome DeepAR’s newly redesigned tool for our community of 10,000 AR Designers!
Things are really accelerating here at DeepAR. We’re almost 8 years old and we’ve transformed in a massive way from a single Face Filter app on the AppStore to an international team of developers, designers and product managers supporting hundreds of amazing brands and businesses and over 10,000 developers touching 80 million end users each month.
We’ve been heads down for the last 18 months completely rebuilding our tech, platform and tools and we’re really excited with the results.
One of the key parts of the DeepAR platform is the ability to create your own amazing AR content for free with the DeepAR Studio — and we’re excited to announce a massive new version called DeepAR Studio 4.0. It’s been over 12 months in the making; it’s a complete rewrite from the bottom up which incorporates so many new developments that it’s hard to list them all — but I am going to try!
The wait is over — we now have Windows support for the Studio. So many of you have asked for this and now we support it. It has been made possible by adopting IMGui. This allows our small but amazingly talented team to develop once and then build for both macOS and Windows. That means we can work faster and more efficiently — and we can ship a more robust desktop application. The tech is really great however we did our own fork of it and added some features that we needed — specifically regarding docking UI elements.
We’ve revamped the way DeepAR Studio works. Everything is now centred around full on 3D editor component which we lacked before. Now you can see the whole scene in its entirety and move around the camera viewport, even adding multiple cameras etc. This provides more context while creating the AR effects.
We’ve made it easier and faster for you to preview the AR experiences that you’re working on with our Preview tool. We provide 2 types of preview options:
A major quality of life improvement, for both preview options, is live reload. Any time you make changes to the underlying resources (textures, shaders, 3d models…) the Preview refreshes and makes the changes visible immediately. E.g. if you change the texture in Photoshop and save it, DeepAR Studio will make sure to rebuild the effect and display it in the Preview on the go. No doubt you’ll appreciate the time saved! 😀
Other cool features include simulating the resolution of different devices, taking screenshots, and changing the camera source.
We’re looking to further improve this by adding video source and video recording capabilities in the near future.
We’ve reviewed all the best AR Studios on the market, listened to all your feedback, and revamped our user interface entirely. We’ve naturally taken queues from Lens Studio and Spark AR Studio, but we’ve also added our unique touch and approach to a number of areas. What separates DeepAR from the other Studio apps which is the way we can work with the tracking points.
In DeepAR Studio, the user can work with a bone rig template that can drive any kind of geometry or component parented to the bones. This is great because it opens up a world of possibilities while comparing to the single 3D template face mesh from SparkAR for example.
There are also some features that are in the development pipeline for the DeepAR that are completely unique; like emotion driven blend shapes. Keep an eye out for these …
We want AR to be more approachable for more developers; but it’s still not easy. One of the biggest areas of focus is adding more sample projects and code right in the developer portal; so that you can get up and running with more AR experiences faster.
Previously you could just share a DeepAR Studio effect file, now we support DeepAR Projects which contain all the raw source assets used in the effect creations. This way the collaboration and version control become much easier. Also it enables us to have prefabs ready to be reused across multiple projects you create. And it’s only going to increase in range over the coming weeks and months.
There is so much more to do on the DeepAR Studio front and we’re excited to be working with you, our ever growing developer community to really push the limits of person-centric AR.
One of the biggest areas you’ll see coming online in the next few months is body-centric AR at Room Scale … stay tuned …
DeepAR Team 💙
We write about AR case studies, insights and the newest AR tech we're creating.
Create an account for free and integrate the SDK within minutes. We even have a load of prebuilt integrations to make your life easier. Or if you prefer, get in touch with us over here.
