SparkAR Watch Party with Facebook Developer Circles Istanbul
On May 21,2020 Facebook Developer Circles hosted a webinar with Yash Sahay , Engineer Manager at SparkAR team, who gave a general perspective to SparkAR, it’s products, feature updates and talked about working for Facebook. Later, for those who didn’t get the chance to attend the live stream, Facebook Developer Circles Istanbul Community organized a watch party with its members to watch the webinar and discuss more about SparkAR. In this post I will highlight the important parts of the webinar.
Why AR?
Taking your reality and augmenting it and creating all sorts of interactions. Things you thought that were impossible before. It makes you feel almost like you have superpowers.
Creating, Deploying and Measuring
What is the process, how do we build in the platform?
“We have the building experience — SparkAR studio, you can build it and test it on the phone. You can publish it on hub and then deploy it on facebook, instagram, messenger. Building a small ecosystem of apps starting with camera on your phone” said Yash.
Spark AR Platform:
- Ease of creation
- SparkAR offers tools to make AR development accessible to all people
2. Capabilities
- Empower relevant, context-aware experiences for people, tracking aspect of AR ( general understanding of your environment and how we can translate that to the application).
3. Distribution
- Open up more channels where people will experience AR — like story time, messenger, facebook and instagram, video calls, games.
SparkAR platform is like a Layered Complexity:
- It’s a way to build a tool for early users if you don’t have much experience. But it’s also for those who are advanced in the field.
- Level 1 — scene tree & inspector
- Level 2 — patch editor
- Level 3 — scripting
Augment Yourself (my face):
- Face tracking enables more precision and accuracy around eyes & mouth
- World class tracking speed
- Support from the realistic to the fantastical
- Hand tracking — hand detection and bounding box tracking, supports single hand poses
- Background segmentation — separate a person from the background, transport people to new destinations, core technology used in Instagram’s “focus”mode
Augment your world (outside camera)
- Target recognition and tracking — find known 2D targets, track and follow (move camera down and it will keep in the context of your experience)
- Location AR — Show at specific locations, location relevant (still working on it)
- Not all are available, but trying to make it public
- Facebook and Instagram only, but we are trying to open more channels
Serve a real need — when creating an effect
Mission is to bring people closer together, understand the need of the cultural context such as — express my aesthetic, capture what i’m feeling thinking or doing, get inspired and have fun, make my friends laugh (funny stuff, add humor), be part of something bigger than myself (building something relevant, something special).
The goal is to create something that people can experience, but nothing too heavy. It it’s important to allow people to be able to express themselves through easy and fun effects.
Augmented would not be possible without the support of all the developers.
Some of the ways to learn about SparkAR and connect more with other developers is to join SparkAR communities, visit and learn from the SparkAR website and join Facebook Developer Circles communities across the globe who host events, workshops and webinars.
What are the benefits of SparkAR over other AR building engines?
There are tons of different platforms out there, but SparkAR studio is one of the easiest platforms that exists out there to start, build and test.
- It can go to complexity which you want
- You can create something simple in couple of minutes and go to something complex within couple hours
- Ease of creation makes SparkAR different from others
Where is the best place to get royalty free assets?
- At SparkAR studio there is a Sketch hub — royalty free assets can be downloaded from there.
True innovation comes from building the assets yourself if you can manage
- Yash Sahay
- Its a great skill to have for developers
When will you add Whatsapp to Spark AR? Can we have platform specific exports?
- No plans for WhatsApp — SparkAR yet
- WhatsApp is a very efficient app, and its a more constraint environment to place SparkAR in
- Exports — currently no plans for this. Platform for development, submitting and publishing
Interest for SparkAR is growing day by day. This webinar helped us to have a better understanding of it’s tools and use of it. In the upcoming days we are looking forward to more online talks and workshops on SparkAR.
To access and watch the full version of the webinar click here.
