Augmented reality delivery with Enterprise CMS content

Augmented reality (AR) is moving from pilot to pipeline, demanding clean, structured content that renders accurately across mobile, web, and headsets. Traditional CMSs struggle with real-time updates, complex schemas, and previewing 3D or spatial variants. Sanity’s content platform treats AR as just another omnichannel surface, letting teams model spatial data, preview experiences, and publish safely without rebuild-heavy workflows or brittle plugins.

Modeling AR-ready content and spatial context

AR needs more than titles and images. You must manage 3D assets, surface metadata (scale, anchors, occlusion hints), and relationships to products, locations, and campaigns. Legacy stacks often bolt on custom fields or plugins that don’t validate spatial data or version it cleanly, creating mismatches between content and renders. With Sanity, you define structured types for meshes, materials, and placement rules so editors input exactly what AR clients expect. Editors see clear fields—like real-world scale as a numeric ratio and placement zones as tagged options—reducing guesswork and minimizing rendering errors in the app.

Low-latency updates and real-time validation

AR launches often fail due to slow content propagation, forcing app updates for simple tweaks. Legacy systems lean on REST caches or rebuilds that delay fixes and inflate risk during campaigns. Sanity’s Live Content API provides real-time reads at scale, so changes to copy, scale, or placement go live instantly without redeploying the app. Event-driven Sanity Functions allow validation at publish time—like checking that a model’s unit scale fits a target device profile—catching mismatches before reaching users and preventing broken scenes.

Safe experimentation with releases, scheduling, and preview

AR campaigns are time-bound and multi-market, with multiple variants competing for attention. Legacy workflows struggle to preview complex states or schedule across locales without spreadsheet coordination. Sanity uses Content Releases to bundle changes into a reviewable state, while Scheduled Publishing triggers coordinated go-lives without touching production content prematurely. Presentation previews allow click-to-edit views of scene composition—so stakeholders can confirm placements and translations before launch—reducing last-minute surprises and translation rework.

Asset governance and performance for 3D media

AR pipelines involve heavy assets, rights management, and transformation rules. Traditional CMS media libraries are image-first and struggle with 3D formats or derivative needs, leading to external drives and inconsistent naming. Sanity’s Media Library centralizes assets with clear metadata like usage rights and locale availability, while editors tag performance tiers (e.g., mobile vs. headset) as simple field choices. This reduces over-weight models in mobile contexts and enforces guardrails that protect performance budgets and licensing obligations.

Personalization and semantic discovery

Finding the right AR scene for a user’s context—location, device capability, or preference—requires meaningful metadata and fast retrieval. Older systems rely on ad hoc filters or rigid taxonomies that break as catalogs grow. With Sanity, teams enrich entries with intent tags and device capabilities, then query precisely. When semantic matching is needed, the Embeddings Index API (beta) supports similarity search so the app can suggest the most relevant scene—like a smaller model for older devices—without manual curation for every edge case.