AR RISING
The World Is Your AR Canvas
Through the wonders of augmented reality, you can deploy your iPhone and iPad as digital brushes and paint the space around you. And when you’re done, not only walk around and admire your art—walk through it and even stand inside it.
The work you’ll create with these three AR apps is the sort you have to see to believe.
World Brush
World Brush lets you paint by moving your device through the air, one AR brushstroke at a time. Paint in solid colors or a “rainbow” brush that blends and shifts across multiple colors as you paint.
There's also a “calligraphy” pen for AR marking that mimics your handwriting, and a “glow” brush that makes your paintings look a bit like neon signage.
If you’d like to post what you’ve made with World Brush, share it anonymously and leave it at the GPS location where you actually painted it. There are already more than 90,000 World Brush paintings located around the globe.
Voxel
Easy enough for amateurs, Voxel is a bit like painting by numbers. The app has dozens of pixel-art templates. You’ll add colors to AR objects, block by block, with results reminiscent of 16-bit videogames from the ’90s.
The templates are grouped within categories—like music, animals, fashion, and food. You can find entire scenes too. (For instance: a penguin relaxing on a raft, or a tiger jumping through a circus hoop.)
Voxel adds templates daily, so you never have to worry about running out of things to paint, whether you prefer to work in 2D or AR. And there are multiple ways to create something special—with color-by-numbers options and unique tools like a “bomb” that lets you color nearby blocks in one big splash.
Assemblr
Used by designers, architects, and animators, Assemblr lets you create and view highly detailed 3D objects in AR.
The app has a deep selection of 3D geometric shapes (cylinders, cubes, and triangles) plus hundreds of premade objects (think couches, trees, and blocks of bricks) and textures (dirt, grass, and water) for you to build with.
To get started, just pick a shape and add some texture or color. Any object you add to your project can be resized and rotated as needed. And as you combine shapes and objects, your art will build bit by bit. Create a 3D model of something specific or combine multiple models to create an entire 3D scene.
If you need inspiration, check out what others have made: dinosaurs, animals, people, cars, houses, even populated castles and forests.