AR Art Projector — AR pipeline rebuild, OpenGL to ARCore

The Engagement

Da Vinci Eye is an AR drawing assistant — point your phone at your sketch surface, the app overlays a reference image you can scale, rotate, and trace. The product was already live on Android, but the camera + AR pipeline had been built with ChatGPT, on top of OpenGL, with no real architecture. The budget didn’t allow for a clean-room rewrite.

I joined as Android lead engineer in March 2024.

What Got Rebuilt

• Camera + AR pipeline: stripped out OpenGL, rebuilt on ARCore + Camera2. Reference-image placement in world space — movement, scale, rotation — went from buggy to predictable.
• Architecture-around, not architecture-from-scratch: the existing screens had to keep shipping. I added the AR functionality without restructuring the surrounding code, then wrote a step-by-step refactor guide so the client team could clean up incrementally.
• The ARCore focus puzzle: ARCore’s default auto-focus fights manual refocus. We almost gave up on ARCore until I found ARCore’s SharedCamera API on a call with another developer — it lets you mix ARCore’s session with a Camera2-controlled focus mode. Solved.
• Through beta and into production: the original contract was a speed-up sprint. After the rebuild landed, the client extended twice — through beta, then through the public launch.

Result

The rebuilt AR pipeline is what shipped in the Feb 2026 relaunch of Da Vinci Eye on Android.

• 4.64★ on Google Play (1.2K reviews)
• 190K+ installs since relaunch
• Patented AR mode, guided setup modes, social section all live on Android

The prior version had been removed from Google Play in January 2026 ahead of the relaunch. The rebuild is the current product.

Stack

Android · Kotlin · Java · ARCore · Camera2 · NDK / JNI · MVVM · Jetpack Compose · Hilt · CI/CD · GitHub Actions