【VR/AR Event】 Report about joining Facebook ‘Spark AR day -Southeast Asia’ Part.1

I participated in ‘Spark AR day -Southeast Asia‘ held at Facebook APAC office in Singapore on the afternoon of March 28th. This time, it is the report about joining the event.

First of all, ‘Spark AR‘ is AR development platform developed by Facebook, and you can release your AR app to Facebook and Instagram. The key point is that you can provide your app to 1.5 billion users without installing the AR app additionally.

And, because of the characteristics of Facebook and Instagram, Spark AR is focusing on People, for example, recognizing people from images, and tracking of face and hands are emphasized.

In my opinion, if it’s a full-fledged AR tool or AR game, it will be actively installed by users. However, like ads or mini-games, users don’t have any motivations and reasons to install those kind of small AR. In addition, I also think seeing AR ads and playing AR mini-games are done in a short time while using Facebook, Instagram.
I think ‘Spark AR’ have development environment for easily developing such kind of small AR, and a platform for providing them to users.

Then, from here it is the story of the day of Spark AR day.

【Agenda of Spark AR day】

The schedule was as follows.

【1. Features of Spark AR】
：「AR for Everyone」by Stephanie Rosenburg (Product Marketing Manager, Spark AR)

【2. Case Study of AR Business】
：「AR Business Opportunities」by Engene Soh (Dude Studios)

【3. How to build a brand using Spark AR】
：「Augmented Creative」by Emmanual Lusinchl (Partner Engineer Manager)

【4. Project Management for Spark AR】
：「Project Management for AR」by Thinh Le (Strategic Partnership Manager)

【5. Create AR with Spark AR Studio】
：「Spark AR Studio Deep Dive」by Sean Blair (Partner Engineer)

I took a lot of pictures on the day, so in this blog I will introduce each talk with many pictures.

【1. Features of Spark AR】

First of all, Stephanie Rosenburg (Facebook Product Marketing Manager, Spark AR) talked about ‘Spark AR‘ as a general topic for those who do not know Spark AR.

Firstly, the main benefit to use Spark AR is the platform. Because it runs on Facebook and Instagram, it can be said to be a cross platform (iOS, Android), and it can be provided to about 1.5 billion people of Facebook and Instagram users.

After all, except Web AR, it is basically necessary to install some application to realize AR, so if it can be supported by Facebook and Instagram which are basically installed, it will be a great platform like Web.

And next, about the functional features of Spark AR, firstly, it has high-performance Face Tracking function. The recognition accuracy of eyes and mouth is very high. In the demo video, looks like the tracking quite perfectly worked.

I feel Facebook’s face recognition technology can sometimes be scary. You know, it automatically detects and reports about photos including me that my friends posted into Facebook. Even just including a very small face in the photo, it is really accurate.

Second, the high-performance Hand Tracking function is also a major functional feature. They said it can handle almost hand poses. In the demo video, he posed like taking out the shock wave from his hand, and it seemed that the function recognized the hand position properly.

And they also provide AR Studio as a development environment of Spark AR. Currently only Mac version is available. However, they announced that the Windows version will be released later this year. (Regarding beta version for Windows, she said they will be able to release soon.)