Standing inside the globe
Augmented reality, and what your device can do with it
AR mode takes the globe off the screen and puts it in the room you are sitting in. On a recent Android phone it goes further than that: you can leave it on the table at the size of a real ornament, or drop the park to its own scale and stand in it, beside the fountain or under the trees.
What your device will do
| Device | What happens |
|---|---|
| Android, Chrome, with ARCore | A full WebXR session. The globe is placed in the room, you can walk around it, and you can switch to standing inside the park. |
| iPhone and iPad | Safari has no WebXR, so the globe is drawn over the camera feed and follows the phone as you turn. On iOS 17 and later the model can also be opened in Quick Look. |
| A headset browser | A full session, with the controls drawn as panels in the scene rather than as part of the page, because a headset browser does not composite the page over its view. |
| Desktop | No AR. The button explains why rather than failing quietly. |
The two ways of looking
Observational
The globe as an object: about the size a real snow globe is, an arm's length away, sitting where you left it. Walking around the room walks around it. This is where AR starts.
Immersive
The same city, at its own size. The shrink the globe applies to the park is undone, so a bench is a bench and the dome overhead is a sky. You do not walk there — the park is bigger than your room — so there are three places to stand, and choosing one puts you in it.
- Fountain. Beside the water, with the skyline behind it.
- Bench. Sat down, at seat height, looking across at the fountain.
- Under the trees. At the drip line of one of the big ring trees, looking up through the canopy at the towers and the sky. Standing against the trunk would put the crown between you and everything worth seeing.
Turning it and sizing it
There is no orbit control in AR: the camera is your phone, and moving it means walking. So the gestures move the globe instead.
- One finger, dragged sideways turns the globe on its axis. A full turn takes about one screen width.
- Two fingers resize it, between roughly half and four times.
- A vertical drag does nothing, deliberately. Tipping a snow globe over is not something anyone wants, and a vertical component in a one-finger drag is almost always someone trying to scroll.
A pinch never turns it and a drag never resizes it, even though a hand opening rotates a little as it goes.
Leaving
Exit AR, the system back gesture, the headset's own menu, or putting the phone down: all four end the session and bring the 3D view back where it started. That was worth saying because for a while only the button worked, and leaving any other way left the app drawing an AR view with nothing behind it — which, since that view's camera stands at eye height in the middle of a globe-sized park, looked like a close-up of the fountain from directly overhead.
If something looks wrong
- The button is disabled. The device has no AR route at all. The button says which.
- Nothing starts after you tap. The session needs camera permission. Check it in the browser's site settings and try again.
- The globe is somewhere odd. Point the phone at a textured, well-lit surface for a second or two: the tracking needs something to hold on to, and a blank wall in a dark room gives it nothing.
- No ads appear in AR. That is on purpose. An advert over a live camera view invites accidental taps and covers the thing you pointed the camera at.
A note on privacy: the camera image is drawn behind the globe on your own device. It is never recorded, uploaded or sent anywhere. The privacy policy says so in full.