The hugely popular Chinese lifestyle app WeChat is developing an augmented reality framework. The framework is being created with smartphones in mind, rather than mixed reality headsets, and represents a new direction for WeChat, which already operates in the social media, mobile payments and online booking spaces. In order to make augmented reality objects, WeChat is building a 3D rendering engine that can create virtual images that can pop out of real-world objects via a smartphone camera interface. Named QAR, it is thought that the augmented reality framework will be opened to third-party developers in the near future, although a date has not yet been set.Â
