Figment AR is a simple ARKit app in which users can add interactive emoji, animals and other types of objects into their surroundings. It’s a nice app for those who just want to test out ARKit and see how it works in a more playful way.
The UI is simple and straightforward. You have several options to chose from 3D objects, effects and “Portals”. The first allows you to spawn different types of 3D objects into your surrounding, like a vase with flowers, soccer ball, a simple cube or sphere, etc. The second option allows you to create special effects like snow falling from the sky, bubbles, fireworks, change the color of the scene using color filters and even apply an optical distortion to the entire scene.
Users can also take a snapshot of the scene or record a video with voice. Figment AR app immediately reminded me about Google’s AR Stickers for its Pixel phones. This app, Figment AR, doesn’t app interaction between two the AR objects. The only thing you can do is to move them around the scene.
Figment AR also doesn’t ask the user to scan the environment for flat surfaces. It does that of course behind the scene. This means that when you put an object, it might not stick to the surface immediately until ARKit is able to detect the surface as the user is moving the device to place objects. This might result in a bad experience for people who just start using the app for the first time. It happened to me when I put objects on the table where the surface detection wasn’t optimal.
This is why it’s important to have some sort of scanning phase where the app notifies the user that it was able to find a suitable surface to place the objects on. As you move around the environment, ARKit will eventually detect all the surfaces and those objects that were floaty might stick in place after further continuous scanning.
I did encounter a massive frame drop when I used the fireworks effect.
The idea is really nice of course. I personally really like the ‘Portals’ feature, it’s really cool. Having the option to take photos and record videos with voice alongside the 3D models is really cool. My problem with this app is that the objects are not that interesting (maybe except the dog which was animated a bit). I’m sure people will like to take a picture with some cool-looking characters, bot just smileys and other simple objects that are used in texting apps.
You can check out the #FigmentAR hashtag on Twitter or Instagram to see what people creating. As of the time of writing this article, there aren’t that many. I actually saw one tweet with a video of a guy sharing his moment with the app while waiting in the train station. In fact, this is where I’ve heard about the app in the first place.
The thing is that these features that you see in Figment AR will eventually find themselves in many apps, even official camera apps for the leading Android phone manufacturers and Apple devices. The thing is that Apple still hasn’t included its own “AR Sticker”-like feature in its own ARKit-enabled devices, but this might come in a future update.
In my opinion, to make Figment AR more attractive, it needs to add more interesting 3D characters with interactivity. I mean, I saw people sharing lots of adorable snaps and vids playing Follow Me Dragon and AR Dragon. Those games have only a single characters and yet people enjoy it so much. The reason is that the characters look really cute and they are interactive. This is necessary to create a more engaging and interesting scene that users will want to engage with and share their moment with those characters with other people.
As I said, Figment AR is a nice ARKit app to start experimenting with this technology but I think people will lose interest in it pretty quickly, especially when apps with more interesting interactive characters are released. I do hope that the developer will add those features in future update because the core app works really nice. I think it would be even more useful to add more type of characters and effects on a weekly basis. Having built-in social features can also be nice as well.