/dev/world 2026

ARKit: Beyond the Tabletop

ARKit's sample code, defaults, and documentation all quietly assume the same scene: a small object, at arm's length, on a table in front of you. Apple's own reference focus square even scales itself for "about a metre from a surface." But a lot of the interesting work happens at the other end of that scale. What happens when you take AR out into the big wide world: when the 3D model is the size of a stadium, the tabletop is a film set, and the people using it are visual effects crews who need the result to be accurate? This talk takes the tabletop assumption apart one layer at a time; placing building-sized models without trapping the viewer inside them, adding flexibilty for models you can't pre-compile, recording an AR session with anything other than ReplayKit, and anchoring a large scene to a real location reliably. Attendees will come away knowing some pitfalls of scaling an AR app and the real-world issues that tutorials don't cover. Real production code, real lessons learned, real years off my life.

About the presenter

Toby Duffy is an independent iOS developer and the creator of PreviewAR, a film and TV pre-visualisation app that lets crews place 3D assets in AR, frame shots through virtual cinema cameras, and record data on set. It has been used on productions including The Last of Us (HBO), Wicked: Parts 1 & 2 (Universal), Foundation (Apple TV+), and Jurassic World (Universal). He has maintained the codebase through nine years of successive platform shifts: ARKit 1 to 6, Swift 3 to 6, the arrival of SwiftUI, and the deprecation of SceneKit.