Breaking down barriers in immersive storytelling

A President's Call

In the realm of Spatial Computing and mobile Augmented Reality (AR), there have always been invisible walls between imagination and reality. These walls take many shapes and forms.

We're not living in a world of lightweight, all-day battery life AR glasses yet, so our entry points to immersive experiences are mobile phones and virtual- and mixed-reality headsets with high-quality cameras and even higher-resolution screens, like the Apple Vision Pro. That being said, although these devices and their ability to understand the world around them can surely be described as engineering pieces of art — it still takes a lot of good design experience to make people forget they are holding up a phone or wearing a big piece of hardware on their forehead.

Another manifestation of these walls is the gap between what creators, brands, and creative studios envision and what they can actually build. Experience design and development for immersive platforms can be a maze to navigate, requiring years of expertise.

Today, and in the true fashion of a Berlin-based company, we follow Reagan's famous call. We want to tear down some walls. In our case, with Scenery, the XR creation and distribution tool that transforms how we build immersive experiences for Apple Vision Pro, Mobile AR, and beyond.

The promise of spatial computing has always been about breaking down the barriers between digital and physical reality. Yet for too long, that promise has been constrained by tools that limit rather than liberate creativity.
And we're here to change that.

Story-time: From Scavenger Hunt Platform to Cross-Platform Creation Engine

Our journey began with a simple but powerful idea back in late 2018: location-based Augmented Reality scavenger hunts on your iPhone, powered by Apple's newly released ARKit — the perfect foundation to build on.

There's a reason why AR scavenger hunts are among the most common use cases in the mobile AR space. If done right, they just work. The reason why is simple: context.

If you're already facing the problem of constantly holding up a phone to embark on a digital experience, context is what pulls you in. The moment your virtual content starts interacting with your physical surroundings is the moment you stop watching and start being part of a story.

In addition to our context-ingredient, we wanted to empower creators from Day-1 to build AR experiences, which resulted in our first app — Scavengar. An AR scavenger hunt app that enables the average Joe to build and share location-based AR scavenger hunts easily and straight from their iPhone.

We started this side-project out of pure passion and curiosity and knew we were onto something when the first brand that reached out to us was Apple.

Over the years 2020–2023, our AR app evolved steadily, we grew as a team along the way, and started building a business on the solid foundation we had laid, always following the road of excitement for the technology and how it enabled creators to tell stories in new formats.

Alongside our evolution, we wanted to break free of the linear storytelling and the gamification-driven nature of scavenger hunts. We wanted to expand the feature set of Scavengar to better reflect non-linear immersive experiences, often driven by collaborations with digital artists and cultural institutions who were interested in rethinking traditional storytelling methods.

We knew our vision evolved, and it was time to listen.

We've been working alongside the biggest entertainment and luxury brands, award-winning agencies, and sought-after creative studios.
Besides immersive projects for Sony Music, Paramount Pictures, Porsche, Highsnobiety, Louboutin, and many more, Scavengar had appearances at big tech’s conference stages like Google IO and WWDC.
We continued to evolve our app while gathering a lot of insights into what works in XR and where the big pain points were.

Scenery came into existence as a solution to the industry's biggest challenges, which we'd like to shine some light on below.

XR Pain Points: A Whole-lotta Challenges

As in many industries, there's a lot of challenges to overcome and problems to solve. However, having worked in the XR space since 2016, and talking to, pitching with, and building for close to 700 brands, studios, and creatives, we identified patterns which came up reliably.

1. The Quality-Accessibility Paradox

When creating immersive experiences, you currently have to make one big decision. Either you focus on the best quality possible, build with traditional game engines like Unity or Unreal, and develop a comprehensive app which users need to install on their devices; or you go with web-based solutions like 8th Wall which are very accessible across devices but lack a lot of quality, therefore immersion.

2. WebAR's Technical Ceiling and Cost

While WebAR promises accessibility, it shows significant limitations, specifically on iOS. As users need to go through the browser, powerful frameworks like WebXR and three.js can't perform at their best, as they don't get access to all the device performance, sensor data, etc. This results in a much worse quality compared to native app solutions, and the AR experiences are often perceived as a gimmick which does not do justice to the potential of this beautiful medium. On top, the only serious solution out there, 8th Wall, charges hefty monthly fees for commercial licenses, on top of the development budget you need to build the actual experience.

3. Misaligned Expectations

The creative industry faces a critical disconnect. Fake-Out-of-Home (FOOH) projects which have been flooding social media in recent years lead to sky-high expectations in terms of quality, while the expectation for the cost of true (actually working) XR projects sits at the very other side of the spectrum. We're seeing an average budget of around 50,000 USD and an expected turn-around of 6–8 weeks. Most of the time when building everything from scratch, both do not get your idea to where it needs to go to meet expectations. This leads once again to the common opinion that XR and AR, in particular, are gimmicks which don't convert and provide a proper ROI.

4. Complex Tools

If you're ready to properly dive into the world of XR development, you probably must embark on the journey of learning how to code, even with AI. Your game engines of choice will most likely be Unity or Unreal Engine, which come with a great set of features but very steep and long learning curves. Ultimately, many platforms like Apple Vision Pro are just partly or not at all supported, and you're still back to challenge No.1, which comes with the necessity of a full app users must download.
Additionally, game engines which are meant for 3D creation don't serve as a good foundation to build intuitive and polished UIs — while the intersection from 2D and 3D is a crucial component to build convincing immersive experiences.

Introducing Scenery: Turning the World into Your Canvas

Scenery came into existence as a solution to the aforementioned challenges. We simply thought if so many creatives keep having the same problems, us included, why don't we build a tool to make it better?

So, what is Scenery, and how exactly is it different?

In a nutshell, Scenery is a fully natively built XR creation and storytelling suite. You can easily craft immersive experiences on macOS and iPadOS while distributing to all Apple platforms (Android and Quest-support is in the making as well!).

We're leveraging Apple's latest and greatest frameworks like ARKit and RealityKit, which results in best-in-class tracking and a consistent performance. The experiences you're building automatically adapt to the device's capabilities, prioritizing the highest quality in balance with a stable framerate. I.e., every experience ships with people occlusion and depth understanding, if a user's device has a LiDAR sensor, you get object occlusion on top, and the resolution of the immersive experience reduces automatically on older devices to guarantee the best possible UX.
Our native approach without traditional game engines and a strong push for the best quality possible is uncommon but important. We're closely following human-interface guidelines to make interactions feel natural. The quality and a certain level of polish have a significant impact on how immersive your experience is going to be perceived. It's a necessity to push the boundaries of visual fidelity and the overall quality to increase immersion and stand out from the crowd.

For many years, our team has been praised for the impeccable user experience and intuitive user interfaces we create — a trait we're excited to bring to Scenery now.

Our long-term vision is to enable creatives to build amazing immersive experiences that seamlessly blend in with your surroundings, turning the whole world into a storytelling canvas. It's of utmost importance for us to provide a tool you can learn in a day and master in weeks instead of months to years.

The low/no-code nature of Scenery allows you to dive right in and build Augmented Reality and Spatial Computing experiences without deep (or any) development knowledge. It's perfect for tech-savvy designers who want to make their ideas come to life instantly.

If you're reading this as a dev — don't worry though. We know many times a no-code tool just does not give you the desired flexibility and customization for your project, and we hear you.

Scenery allows you to script with JavaScript and dynamically influence and alter your experience. This way you can easily build an immersive livestream event for Vision Pro, or connect data collected in the physical world to influence your location-based AR experience.

Also, in light of the impeccable visual quality you're striving for, you can write custom shaders and post-processing effects, fine-tune them within Scenery, and see how they apply to your scene in real-time. I.e., you can create ray-marched objects within your AR experience that offer you a fluidity of shapes and real-time reflections — all running on an average mobile phone.

However, it does not always have to be custom shader development to create memorable immersive experiences.

Besides 3D models (.usdz), you can compose your scene with various media types. Scenery supports videos (stereoscopic, with transparency, immersive, and livestreams), 2D imagery, a variety of audio formats (ambient, spatial, and stereo), and even custom haptics to create multi-sensory experiences. It's crucial to approach the medium not solely from a visual point of view but design experiences that reach users on a haptic and auditory level.

Complex interactivity can be created easily with a trigger-based event system, giving you full control over complex mechanics — from collecting coins, over interacting with virtual rocks that fall off your ceiling, to voice-overs that start playing once you look closer at an object.

A variety of physics properties, custom Machine Learning models, advanced animation system, people and object occlusion, a geo-locations-based AR editor, and not one but two (!) Visual-Positioning-Systems (VPS) complete a rough overview of the tool's features for XR creation.

The pièce de résistance: Seamless Distribution & Custom Branding

While you made it through the long list of the features Scenery is offering, we didn't get a chance to shine some light on our most unique USP yet: the seamless distribution through AR App Clips.

Remember the Quality-Accessibility Paradox and the shortcomings of WebAR? None of that matters for experiences you create with Scenery.

Any experience you create can be shared as an AR App Clip. Imagine this as a condensed version of an app that opens instantly and without the need to detour to the App Store. On the contrary — your experience is accessible through a QR code, link to share on a website, or well hidden behind an NFC tag you put in a physical object. A simple scan is enough to immerse users instantly while keeping the performance and quality of a full-blown native immersive app.

Say goodbye to the tricky decision between quality and accessibility and hello to high-quality XR stories that feel great and are easy to distribute.

Closely connected to the distribution are sharing and branding features, which are crucial if you're interested in building immersive experiences for your clients.
Every experience you build can be enhanced with custom branding, custom UIs, and logos that automatically get applied to photos and videos your users snap. For commercial use, you can purchase individual licenses per experience.

No monthly licensing fees.
No hassle.
Only good high-quality content.

An important addition to the easy distribution is the cross-platform compatibility when it comes to Spatial Computing. While it's not only possible to deploy and preview your immersive experiences while you're working on them through hot-reloading in real time, you can deploy your AR experience to Apple Vision Pro and vice versa without any extra work.

This way, you can build next-level Spatial Computing experiences and still reach billions of people with it — without app download.

You'll discover how much more efficient you're going to be and how fast you can produce high-quality immersive concepts. This allows you to invest your time and budget into better visual assets, thought-through interactions, and overall elevate the quality of your XR experiences.

By creators, for creators.

Scenery is for all the creatives out there who think differently. It's for people who are genuinely interested in fusing real and digital worlds together, rethinking how stories can be told in new ways, shapes, and forms.

We've been developing a variety of XR projects on top of our software, mostly in Entertainment, Luxury, and Culture, but we can't wait to see, hear, and experience what you'll be using the creative suite for.
If you're frustrated with the limitations of current tools in the immersive space and you share our vision to rethink how we can use Spatial Computing and Augmented Reality to tell better stories, this one is for you.

Over the past 1.5 years, we've been continuously developing and improving Scenery alongside the feedback of over 500 creatives, agencies, and brands. We don't intend to change that approach but want to embrace an active feedback culture, to develop XR software that brings value to the people. We want you to share your most-desired features and use cases to build a tool that makes your life easier and your immersive experiences better.

Scenery is built by creators, for creators.

The Future is spatial

We stand at the threshold of a new era in computing, where digital experiences become truly spatial. This shift isn't just about technology — it's about transforming how we interact with information, with each other, and with the world around us.

As we embrace this transformation, Scenery emerges not just as a tool, but as a bridge to this spatial future. We want to take down the walls that are holding back creators from building experiences that don't just exist in space, but truly belong there.

The world is spatial. Creation should be too.