Scan a real object
Turn something in front of you into a 3D model, then place it in a world and view it back in your room. Capture happens in a scanning app on your phone — those do real photogrammetry from dozens of angles on-device, for free, and get better results than a single photo ever could.
Capture with a scanning app
All three are free for what you need here.
Free with no export paywall, no watermarks and no scan limits. Exports GLB directly, which is exactly what this app wants.
- PolycamiPhone · Android
The free tier exports glTF only — which happens to be the one format needed here. OBJ, FBX and STL need a paid plan, but none of those matter for AR.
- RealityScaniPhone · Android
Epic's app, free and unlimited. Export runs through Sketchfab rather than straight to your phone, so it is an extra hop to get the GLB.
Shoot it properly
Scans well
- +Matte, textured surfaces — fabric, stone, wood, painted metal
- +Objects you can walk all the way around
- +Even, indirect light with soft shadows
- +Something roughly between a mug and a motorbike in size
Fights back
- −Glass, mirrors and chrome — reconstruction has nothing to latch onto
- −Plain single-colour surfaces with no visible texture
- −Thin structures like wires, railings or leaves
- −Anything that moves, including people and pets
Circle the object slowly at two or three different heights, keeping it filling most of the frame. Overlap each shot with the last. Move yourself rather than the object — a scan of a rotating thing on a static background confuses reconstruction badly.
Export as GLB
Choose GLB (or glTF) when exporting. It is the only format this app reads, and the only one that carries geometry and textures in a single file.
Pick the lowest quality preset that still looks right, and cap textures at 2K. Raw scans routinely come out at 50–200 MB, which is unusable over mobile data. Uploads here are compressed automatically, but that cannot rescue a million-polygon mesh — the reduction has to happen at export.
Add it to a world
Drop the GLB into the editor alongside library models and 3D text, arrange it, and save to get a QR code.
Open the editorScanning inside this app would mean sending a single photo to a paid reconstruction service, which guesses whatever the camera could not see. The apps above capture the real thing from every angle for nothing, so that is the route worth taking.