London Soho's Indian fine-dining spot Dishoom reported a 22% increase in average ticket size in 2024 after wiring WebXR food preview into their QR menu. The trick: no app install, no App Store friction, pure browser AR.
model-viewer.dev: One HTML Tag, Three Platforms
Google's open-source <model-viewer> web component routes the .usdz file to iOS Quick Look on Safari and the .glb to Android Scene Viewer on Chrome. One markup line covers both ecosystems plus desktop preview.
The customer taps "View in your space," points the camera at the table, and the dish renders at true scale. iOS 18 Quick Look now supports interactive animation, sound, and physics — biryani steam included. Scene Viewer's plane detection is robust enough for indoor lighting.
File Size: The 200KB Mobile Cliff
Keeping each 3D asset under 200KB is non-negotiable. On 4G, a 1MB model takes 3–4 seconds; the user bounces. Optimization pipeline:
- Blender Decimate: drop poly count to 5K–10K. Bake PBR textures to 512×512.
- gltf-pipeline: Draco mesh compression + Basis Universal (KTX2) textures. Typical 75% size reduction.
- RealityConverter (macOS): .glb → .usdz for native iOS AR Quick Look.
Cloudflare R2 Hosting: $0.015/GB/month
200 dishes × 200KB = 40MB total. R2 has zero egress fees and storage at $0.015/GB-month — effectively $0.0006/month. thMenu Pro+ users auto-host 3D models under menu-images/3d-models/ with immutable URLs and global CDN.
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000, immutable. Hash the model bytes into the URL (biryani-a8f3.glb); when you update the asset, the new hash invalidates cache automatically. CORS: Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * for cross-domain QR menus.
FAQ
Do I need a 3D artist? No. Photogrammetry apps like Polycam or RealityScan capture a dish from 30–40 phone photos in 3–5 minutes. Output is clean enough for AR Quick Look.
Will old phones support it? Quick Look ships on iOS 12+ (2018). Scene Viewer needs Android 7+ and ARCore. Combined device coverage exceeds 92% of active smartphones.
Is model-viewer free? Apache 2.0 license, maintained by Google. Production users include Shopify, IKEA, and Pinterest.
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