Augmented Reality (AR) apps are increasingly getting popular across industry niches for the sheer usefulness they display in terms of user engagement. This is why leading mobile platforms like Apple and Google are continuing to deliver new and improved AR toolkits for developers. Google offered ARCore for Android developers, while the iOS platform also offered ARKit 1.5 loaded with enhanced AR-based features for building immersive AR applications. While both toolkits are seemingly complete and richly featured for their respective platforms, they are platform-specific and don’t allow cross-platform rendering.

But what about building a cross-platform AR app using a popular framework such as React Native? Well, React Native as the most popular cross-platform app development framework with the promise of native user experience can now bring AR experience within reach of app users by utilizing several toolkits. Here through the length of this post, we are going to explain cross-platform AR app development by using the React Native framework.

To begin with, you must have a comprehensive understanding of the various existing tools available for developing AR apps for Android and iOS platforms using React Native framework. There are several native wrappers for implementing the AR into iOS and Android, but sadly, these wrappers don’t have adequate documentation to guide the developers. So, using them can lead to experimental output with a lack of consistency. Three such common wrappers are the following.

The professional React Native app developers also talk about building an ARCore library by using Sceneform with react-native-arkit. But creating a fully operational native wrapper for ARCore involves a slightly higher learning curve involving both Sceneform and Java expertise.

This is where ViroReact comes in as a great React Native solution for AR-based app development.

ViroReact is a fully-fledged cross-platform library created by ViroMedia. It helps developers to deliver a perfect cross-platform AR app experience by utilizing custom renderer that can wrap both ARCore and ARKit, respectively, for the Android and iOS platforms.

ViroReact helps the rapid development of AR/VR apps using React Native. It allows utilizing the core strength of React Native, that is to say, reusability of the code. Developers, by using ViroReact, can utilize a single code base for developing and deploying AR/VR features on both iOS and Android versions of the app. The platform is free and open-source and offers effective documentation. Most importantly, setting up a project is extremely easy, and it takes not more than 15 minutes or so.

ViroReact uses two APIs provided, respectively, for delivering AR experience on iOS and Android platforms. These two APIs are ARKit for iOS and ARCore for Android.

ViroReact platform uses JSX for describing any scene, and thanks to this, delivering AR or VR experiences becomes really easy.

ViroReact platform offers full support for ARCore 1.0 to allow developers to deploy AR apps on the Android platform. By utilizing ViroReact and the ARCore wrapper, the developers can build robust AR apps enriched with immersive videos, 3D Objects, augmented sound effects, physics, and particle effects.

ViroReact platform offers full support for ARKit 1.5 to build AR apps for iOS users. By utilizing ARKit you can deliver iOS-specific AR features such as vertical plane detection, Marker and Image tracking, and several others.

The ViroReact also offers full support for PBR modeling to create more life-like AR experiences on the screen with objects with a more realistic look and feel. Physically-based rendering or PBR represents a cluster of rendering techniques to ensure a more realistic representation of scenes enriched with real-world lighting, objects, and material surfaces. The additional artist workflow of this tool also helps to present objects with articulate parameters.

ViroReact has emerged as the most formidable and acclaimed tool for cross-platform AR apps rich with an immersive experience. Let us now explain the key steps involved in building an AR app using ViroReact.

The ViroReact platform is completely free, and open-source can be used by anyone, for some effective guidelines take help from the official documentation or some Github repository showing real AR projects. Make sure you have the right iOS or Android device enabled for either iOS ARKit or Android ARCore.

First of all, you need to be versed in the tits-bits of AR app development by utilizing various web resources and tutorials. The ViroReact documentation will be your primary and most important guide here. Later, you need to know about adding various characters and elements to the app step by step. In all seriousness, never forget to get inspired and learn a thing or two from the existing AR apps built using ViroReact.

React Native will continue to remain as the most popular framework for all kinds of cross-platform app development projects. Thanks to the ViroReact library, React Native can also be utilized to build robust cross-platform AR apps enriched for an immersive experience. The Indianappdevelopers are at the forefront of delivering rich AR experience on both iOS and Android platforms.

Building Cross-Platform AR Apps With React Native was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.