Packar Creator lets brands turn physical packaging into an augmented reality surface. A marketing team composes a 3D scene in the browser, attaches it to a printed target such as a label or a box face, and anyone who scans that target with a phone camera sees the experience render live on top of the product. No app install, no SDK integration, everything runs in the browser.
I built across the full stack of this platform, with a focus on the editor and the real-time rendering pipeline.
The problem
AR for packaging traditionally required native apps and agencies. Every campaign meant custom development, app store review cycles and users who refused to install anything. WebAR removes the install barrier, but it introduces a harder problem: the authoring tool. Non-technical marketing people need to assemble 3D scenes, position content in space, preview the result and publish, all without touching a line of code.
What I built
The heart of the product is the configurator, a browser-based editor built with React and Three.js. Users place 3D models, video panels, buttons and text into a scene anchored to their packaging artwork, manipulate transforms directly in the viewport, and see exactly what the customer will see. The same scene graph that drives the editor drives the end-user AR view, so preview and production never drift apart.
Behind the editor sits an account and project system: teams create experiences, manage their target images, and publish versions. Publishing generates the lightweight runtime payload that the scanning page loads, tuned aggressively for size because it runs on mid-range phones over mobile connections.
The rendering layer was the most demanding part. WebGL performance varies wildly across devices, so the runtime adapts: texture sizes, lighting complexity and render resolution scale to the hardware, keeping frame rates usable on phones several generations old while looking sharp on new ones.
Under the hood
The stack is React and Next.js on the front, Node.js services behind, with Three.js doing the heavy lifting in both the editor and the viewer. Scenes serialize to a compact JSON format that versions cleanly, which makes experiences editable after publication without breaking scans already in the wild.
The outcome
Packar Creator is live and serving brands that want AR campaigns measured in days, not agency quarters. The self-service model works: a marketer can go from empty scene to scannable packaging experience in an afternoon.