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Glossary

PausAR Viewer

PausAR Viewer is a WordPress plugin for 3D product visualization and Web AR, designed for the Elementor Page Builder. It serves an interactive 3D viewer on every browser and switches automatically into Apple Quick Look on iOS and Google Scene Viewer on Android for true-to-scale AR placement. Files are uploaded as GLB and USDZ, no JavaScript or per-product HTML required. PausAR Viewer is the central product in the PausAR Studio ecosystem from Paus Design & Medien (Bocholt, Germany).

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PBR Materials

PBR (Physically Based Rendering) is the modern standard for representing surface materials in real-time 3D, including web 3D and AR. Instead of fixed shaders that approximate how a material looks, PBR materials describe physical properties (base color, roughness, metallic value, surface normal), so renderers can compute realistic lighting consistently across devices. PBR is native to glTF/GLB and is what makes a model look the same in Blender, in the browser via Three.js, in Apple Quick Look and on Apple Vision Pro.

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Photogrammetry

Photogrammetry is the technique of building 3D models from many overlapping photos of a real object, building or place. Software like RealityCapture, Agisoft Metashape, Polycam, Luma AI and Apple Object Capture reconstructs camera positions and surface geometry from the images, then projects the photos back onto the mesh as textures. Together with LiDAR-based scanning, it is the most practical way to capture real-world objects in a form usable for web 3D and Web AR.

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Reality Composer

Reality Composer is Apple’s no-code app for building, testing and tuning AR scenes on iPhone and iPad, available free on the App Store. You arrange 3D objects, add behaviours and triggers by drag and drop, and export the result as a USDZ or a .reality file. The macOS version was bundled with Xcode through Xcode 14.3.1 and removed in Xcode 15; for visionOS authoring, Apple now provides Reality Composer Pro.

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Reality Composer Pro

Reality Composer Pro is Apple’s macOS app, bundled with Xcode and introduced alongside visionOS, for composing and optimising 3D scenes for RealityKit apps. You import and organise models, author materials with a node-based Shader Graph built on MaterialX, add audio and simple animation, preview, and the scene flows straight into your Xcode project. It is a developer tool for native spatial apps, based on the USD format.

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RealityKit

RealityKit is Apple’s high-level 3D rendering and simulation framework, written in Swift. While ARKit senses the world, RealityKit draws and animates the virtual content on top: physically based materials, lighting, physics, audio and animation. With RealityKit 4 it spans iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS, and on the Apple Vision Pro it is the primary way apps render 3D. It is a native-app technology, not something you touch to put AR on a website.

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Samsung Galaxy XR

Samsung Galaxy XR is the first headset built on Google’s Android XR platform. It is a passthrough Mixed Reality headset with dual Micro-OLED displays, the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip and Gemini AI built in, launched in 2025 at around 1,800 US dollars. Because it runs Android apps and a Chromium-based browser with WebXR, standards-based web 3D and AR, including pages built with PausAR Viewer, are viewable on it.

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Spatial Computing

Spatial computing is the broad category of computing where digital content interacts with physical space, instead of being confined to a 2D screen. It overlaps almost entirely with what the industry calls AR and MR. The term comes from a 2003 MIT Media Lab thesis but became mainstream when Apple positioned the Vision Pro as ‘a spatial computer’ at its 2024 launch. For the web, the practical question is whether your 3D content is usable on spatial computing devices, which it is by default through standards-based 3D.

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STEP

STEP stands for Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data and is formally specified in ISO 10303. It’s the dominant open CAD exchange standard, used heavily in industrial and mechanical engineering. STEP describes 3D parts mathematically through parametric geometry, perfect for engineering but unsuitable for direct display on the web. For Web AR, STEP files are therefore converted into polygon-based formats like GLB or USDZ.

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Three.js

Three.js is the most widely used JavaScript library for rendering 3D graphics in the browser. It sits on top of WebGL and hides its complexity behind a clean API for scenes, cameras, lights and materials. Most web 3D viewers, including Google’s model-viewer, are built on Three.js, which makes it the quiet engine behind a large share of 3D and AR on the web.

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