Delhi-based Hitesh Goyal regularly spends about two hours daily on an augmented reality (AR) game-- Quest on social media platform magic pin to enhance his ranking in the leader boards and win prizes. Like Pokémon Go, Quest is an Augmented reality game. It helps the users win points by finding characters or treasure chests within 800,000 partner stores and restaurants in India. These points can be redeemed later on magicpin’s app for various discounts.

Now, AR stickers, AR games, 360-degree videos, and stories are being increasingly used on social media platforms, chiefly by youngsters. This information is not lost on companies. Early this month, for example, Snap Inc. declared new AR-based experiences in Snapchat for creators, associates, and users, letting them to craft and add live animations on moving objects, pets and people. Thus, user can include an interactive Augmented reality sticker on a face or object and the sticker will also change as the object will move. Anybody can use Snapchat’s Lens Studio to create and publish their AR content on the platform. Recently, YouTube has added Snapchat-like AR selfie filters for its Stories.

Similarly, in Facebook Augmented Reality ad campaigns and games are creating a lot of buzzes. There are some multiplayer AR chat games like Don’t Smile and Asteroids Attack in Facebook Messenger. The former is a staring contest in which the first person to smirk loses and in the latter, users can cross a space ship with their face. Due to Facebook, AR content is getting a lot easier on its platform for users by incorporating 3D filters from Sketchfab with the AR Studio. It means users can search 3D models and add them directly in their AR project. Sketchfab has over 1,50,000 3D assets which are available for free download under Creative Commons licensing. Additionally, creators can add music from Facebook’s free audio library.

Furthermore, brands like Shoppers Stop and Lenskart are now trying to connect with their customers using AR experiences on social media platforms like Facebook. “Augmented reality helps these guys break the barrier and make their brands standout without using an app, which cuts the cost and time of deployment," says Spriha Neogi, co-founder and chief operating officer at Attero Labs, a Mumbai-based company that has facilitated many of these experiences on Facebook.

By AR, online sellers can give that total experience of the product from where they are. According to Neogi, in one of the Augmented reality campaigns of a handbag on Facebook, customers could see the actual size of the bag and by that, they will not have any confusion in their mind. In the case of magic pin, players can check the gamers in their environs as well as those at the top of the leader boards.

The Augmented Reality game of them was built on Google ARCore for Android devices and Apple ARKit for iOS and included with Unity. They also use standardized AR technologies from Kudan to project an object in the real world at a certain coordinate.

Having the capacity to build such products which are putting a gamified layer on top makes them very interesting for users. Making these fun experiences in a local perspective opens up a big market that hasn’t been tapped, said Anshoo Sharma, co-founder, and CEO of magicpin.

Neogi shows the reason why AR at first didn’t take off was that facial recognition platforms initially were not as good as they are now on platforms such as Facebook. Similarly, the AR filters today look more hyper-realistic as they are baked into the skin. Platforms like Facebook have made it smoother to optimize the size of the AR content, which makes them more accessible to users.