AR Patterns
An open platform and shared design language for planning, implementing, and documenting event-driven augmented-reality experiences.
Technologies
Technical summary
Making AR behavior discussable
AR experiences are difficult to describe before they exist. Spatial context, detections, timing, user movement, and application state all affect what happens next. AR Patterns gives designers and developers a shared vocabulary for those interactions rather than forcing every conversation down to platform-specific source code.
AR Patterns was a joint project between ZHAW and Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), funded by the DIZH Innovation Program through its Outreach Call. I worked on it with Philipp Ackermann at ZHAW, and with Alessandro Holler and Stefan Schmidlin at ZHdK. My contribution included technical leadership, platform development, and work on the visual language used to communicate event-driven AR behavior.
The platform
The public platform combines four practical tools:
- Pattern catalog — reusable solutions to recurring AR design problems.
- ECA diagrams — Event-Condition-Action rules that describe reactive behavior in a compact, technology-agnostic format.
- Illustration toolbox — a consistent visual system for showing users, real-world context, detections, and augmentations.
- AR scenarios — concrete implementations across no-code, low-code, and full-code platforms.
Project walkthrough
The walkthrough starts at the section that best demonstrates how the catalog and its supporting tools fit together. The complete platform remains available at arpatterns.dev.
Research output
The project also produced the peer-reviewed paper Illustrating AR Patterns: A Visual Language for Event-Driven Augmented Reality, co-authored with Alessandro Holler, Martina Kessler, Stefan Schmidlin, Yanick X. Lukic, and Philipp Ackermann. The platform remains public and open to community contributions.
For a complementary approach to technology-independent XR representations, see the Spatial Reasoner project.