ZEH FERNANDO

Spark AR Scenes

Disclaimer: details on this page are restricted to publicly known information. See the list of mentions for sources.

Spark AR Scenes (also known during development as “Spark AR Camera”) was a standalone, AR-first camera app from Meta’s Spark AR. Built around augmented reality, it let users add virtual objects, text, and effects on top of the real world, and then take pictures or record videos of it. Recorded media could then be shared to Instagram, or saved on the user’s device. Think of Instagram’s “stickers” for stories, but in 3D.

This was my very first project at Meta. I was hired to work on the Android version of the app, in what was then called the “World Experiences” organization. I already had plenty of experience with Android development, but this was still a project with a lot of firsts for me, considering the custom infrastructure I had to onboard to, and the fact that creating a new app from scratch is something nearly unheard of at the company. Most of Meta’s tooling is built around its established products, so bootstrapping a fresh app meant a lot of groundwork before we could even ship builds reliably. A lot of my time was spent standing up the app’s release engineering: the CI/CD pipeline, versioning, signing, and Google Play setup. This was in addition to maintaining and expanding the user interface of the app.

The other big challenge was performance. The app leaned heavily on world camera and world-tracking features — anchoring virtual content into a real, moving environment — and keeping that fast and stable across a wide range of Android devices took continuous work and a lot of collaboration between different departments.

Sadly, while the iOS version made it out the door and went through closed and open betas, as well as a public release, the app was ultimately canceled; the Android version was wrapped up right before we were supposed to start public beta testing.

Even so, it was a great project to be part of: the AR camera hypothesis showed promise, and the work was later absorbed by Instagram itself for a feature called AR Stickers, my follow-up project at Meta.