Despite the wide availability of markerless augmented reality experiences for mobile devices, there is still a market for scanned triggers for content, as evidenced by the new image recognition capabilities on Facebook's Camera AR platform.
AR experiences for the movies Ready Player One, which hits theaters next weekend, and A Wrinkle in Time, which is now showing, are now among the camera effects available in the Facebook app for iOS and Android.
Originally reported by TechCrunch, both AR experiences are triggered by scanning promotional posters, opening portals to virtual worlds depicted in the films.
The effect for A Wrinkle in Time furthers the illusion with floating plants that spill out of the portal and into the viewer's environment. It also offers a front-facing camera effect that produces shimmering selfies.
Meanwhile, Ready Player One also offers a second experience that turns the rear-facing camera view into a 360-degree virtual tour of a basement that doubles as a museum of 1980s pop culture.
With ARKit and ARCore offering app developers and advertisers access to similar features via the AR platforms for Facebook and Snapchat, one would think that marker-based AR experiences would have been rendered obsolete.
However, marketers clearly still see value in AR content triggered by scanning images. For the movie industry, it makes sense since posters are still the cornerstone of promotional tactics used by studios. Now, with image recognition coming to iPad and iPhone apps via ARKit 1.5 and Facebook now adding the function to its AR capabilities, marker-based AR gains a new lease on life.
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