8th Wall

8th Wall is a WebAR development platform that lets creators build augmented reality experiences running directly in a mobile browser, no app download required. Users scan a QR code or tap a link and the experience loads immediately, using SLAM-based world tracking built independently of ARKit and ARCore so it works across a broad range of devices. Niantic acquired 8th Wall in 2022, and it became a core piece of the AR tooling behind brand campaigns, marketing activations, and web-based try-on and gaming experiences for years afterward.

The platform's status has changed substantially. Niantic sold its games division (including Pokémon GO) to Scopely in 2023 and later spun out its geospatial and AI mapping work into Niantic Spatial, redirecting the company's focus toward large world models rather than consumer AR tooling. As part of that shift, Niantic Spatial shut down 8th Wall's hosted services in February 2026, closing new account creation and edit access, and released the underlying codebase as open source. Existing hosted projects were set to keep running only until February 2027, after which the hosted platform goes offline entirely.

For anyone evaluating 8th Wall today, it's effectively a legacy platform in transition: the technology lives on as an open source WebAR toolkit that developers can self-host, but the managed cloud editor, XR Studio, and turnkey publishing that made it popular with agencies and brands are being wound down. Teams that relied on 8th Wall for hosted WebAR campaigns are actively migrating to alternative WebAR providers as the shutdown deadline approaches.