AR Creator Course: START HERE

Welcome! If you want to make augmented reality and actually understand what you are doing and why you are doing it, you are in the right place.

This is a hands-on course on becoming an AR creator. Not a tour of one app’s buttons, but the durable skills: how to think in 3D, design experiences people love, and build them across phones, the web, and glasses.

• Curious beginners who want a real foundation, not a pile of disconnected tutorials.

• Designers, artists, and developers moving into AR from another field.

• Anyone who wants to build for the wave of AR glasses arriving now, without ignoring the billions of phones already in pockets.

No experience required. We start from the ground up.

If you’re new here, hi, I’m Heather Dunaway Smith. Here is the short version of why you might trust me on this. I just want you to know the guidance comes from real miles, not a weekend of research.

I’m a life long artist and I’ve spent almost 20 years making interactive and immersive work, and AR for most of the last decade. I sit right where art meets engineering: storytelling and design on one side, actually building the thing on the other. Along the way I’ve been lucky to create for Snap, Adobe, and Meta (with Coachella, Nickelodeon, and Highlights in the mix), to be an Adobe AR Art Resident and to speak at and curate the AR Art Gallery at Adobe MAX, and to be in the first groups of creators handed Snap’s Spectacles and Meta’s Quest. Mostly it adds up to a lot of lived-experience: I’ve built for most of the major platforms, shown large-scale public work from Dublin to Art Basel Miami to Seoul, and made plenty of mistakes worth warning you about. (I also run an immersive studio, Curiodynamo.)

The honest heart of it: I’ve been around the block, picked up a lot, and want to pass it on. That is what this course is. The shortcuts, the hard-won lessons, and a way of thinking that outlasts any single tool.

Want the longer story? Read more about me.

Want to see my work? Check out socials (Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube) or my website.

• New lessons drop regularly. Follow along as the course grows.

• Free and paid. Some lessons and all the quick references are free. The full course lives behind a paid subscription. Subscribe to unlock everything.

• Concepts first, tools second. The ideas hold up even as the software changes.

• Go in order, or jump around. Start at Module 1 for the full arc, or head straight to what you need.

• 1. The Big Picture: what AR really is, the landscape, and the mindset shift.

• 2. Thinking Spatially: designing for 3D space instead of a flat screen. [COMING SOON]

• 3. The Building Blocks: anchors, occlusion, tracking, location, and more. [COMING SOON]

• 4. AR Interaction Design: tap, pinch, poke, gaze, and voice. [COMING SOON]

• 5. Spatial Visual Design Techniques: the design principles that make experiences clear and intuitive. [COMING SOON]

• 6. Crafting an Experience: the idea, audience, storyboarding, prototyping, iterating. Conceptual and pre-production. [COMING SOON]

• 7. 3D Core Principles: building, exporting, and optimizing 3D for real-time. [COMING SOON]

• 8. VFX: particles, shaders, and post-processing. [COMING SOON]

• 9. Coding & Building: how to build and code an AR project, and the smart way to build with AI as your partner. [COMING SOON]

• 10. From Idea to Build: the technical build and ship workflow: getting it into the tool, testing on device, publishing. Hands-on and post-production. [COMING SOON]

• AR Glossary: plain-English definitions for every bit of jargon.

• AR Platforms: the current landscape and how to choose your tools.

• AR Design Checklist: a self-check to run against any project.