Most AR failures are a units bug
The single most common AR defect we are called in to fix is a model authored in centimetres and presented as metres. It is a one-line fix and it destroys the entire value proposition until someone finds it.
AR's only genuine commercial claim is 'this will fit in your room'. Every reported benefit — lower returns, higher confidence, longer engagement — flows from getting real-world scale right.
And scale is where it breaks, constantly. CAD authored in millimetres, exported without unit metadata, imported as metres, placed in a room as a 3-metre-tall chair. The customer laughs, closes the app, and the retailer concludes AR is a gimmick.
OBJ carries no units at all. FBX carries them inconsistently. glTF specifies metres and is therefore the only sane place to normalise. We assert units at ingest and fail the build if a part's bounding box is implausible for its category — a chair wider than four metres is a units bug, not a product.
It is a trivial check that almost nobody runs, and it is the difference between AR working and AR being a punchline.
Written by the commerce team at 3D.MBA, Ahmedabad.
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