Introducing ArBit

Updated September 14, 2026.

Alongside my HUD Companion experiment, I was reading Szeliski and refreshing the maths behind computer vision. I wanted to build a lightweight version of ARKit in Rust.

The first goal was monocular visual-inertial odometry, or VIO: use one camera and the phone's motion sensors to estimate its position and orientation as it moves. That's where ArBit started.

The name is quite literal. The bits of an AR library.

Then I wanted virtual objects to stay attached to physical places. That took the project toward SLAM: tracking the camera while building a map of its surroundings.

I built an iPhone app to see what was happening as I moved the camera. This early recording shows it finding points in the image and following them as the camera moves.

The feature tracking ran on the phone. Estimating the camera's movement reliably and keeping anchors in place are still the work ahead.

The code is on GitHub.