BatchAR - Augmented Reality made easy

The cultural and creative industries keep asking us for simple AR applications. "Simple" does not mean simple at all, but rather that creating, making available and accessing the experiences is feasible without disproportionate additional effort or costs. After all, anyone who has previously toyed with the idea of adding digital layers to analog content has either had to invest in a tailor-made code solution or bow to the specifications of the few established providers and accept expensive subscription models, compulsory apps or, at best, patchy end device support.

Ideally, it should be easy to link analog and digital assets in just a few steps and display them on any reasonably modern smartphone or tablet. Admittedly: There are freely accessible software libraries that provide all the desired functionalities. But using them inevitably requires programming skills. Artists and creatives who have no experience in working with code are therefore left out.

We developed BatchAR with this problem in mind. In the browser-based web app, analog tracking markers and digital assets can be easily linked together using drag-and-drop. Once the assignment has been made, one click is enough to automatically combine the content into an AR experience that can be downloaded as a zip file. The content of this zip file can then be uploaded to your own web server without any further changes. This means that if you have your own domain or website, you can provide the application yourself without any programming knowledge. To enjoy the experience, all you need to do is call up the website with your smartphone's browser and share the camera. If the app then recognizes a tracking marker, the corresponding asset is displayed

Of course, the experience not only works with smartphones, but also on tablets and even on computers with webcams. The BatchAR is available in German and English at
https://batchar.kreativ.institute
and can be used free of charge. The fact that the BatchAR offers real added value has already been demonstrated during the Detmold Design Week 2024. At the "Lego Printing Forms" workshop, great art prints were created using the Lego printing process. Of course, the participants were allowed to take their works home with them. However, BatchAR also made it possible to exhibit the results of the workshop to the public afterwards - as an AR experience, of course. Posters with QR codes and tracking markers served as physical anchors for the digitized exhibits, which can still be viewed today:

BatchAR uses the open source software libraries described above for processing and converting the image data and makes them usable for everyone with the help of the simple interface. The best thing: all this happens locally in the browser so that the data does not have to leave the computer. Since the finished AR application (the contents of the zip file, the so-called "batch") is ultimately nothing more than a website, cultural and creative professionals can decide for themselves where and how to host their experience. This ensures maximum independence.

As the BatchAR is based on open source software and can be adapted to cover many other use cases, it is published under the MIT license. The source code can be found here:
https://github.com/KreativInstitut-OWL/batchar