Hire the Top 3% of Freelance Augmented Reality Developers
Toptal is a marketplace for top AR developers, engineers, programmers, coders, architects, and consultants. Top companies and startups can hire dedicated (full-time), hourly, or part-time AR freelancers for their mission-critical software projects.
Nathan has over a decade of experience in varying engineering roles. He started at Microsoft and continued as a full-stack developer for several years before transitioning to iOS. He has recently been a freelance iOS and visionOS developer focused on developing augmented reality (AR) apps for various startups. Previously, Nathan led an iOS team in building AR apps that integrated with physical toys for kids, promoted problem-solving, and developed digital literacy via 2D games and AR activities.
Jeffrey has over a decade of experience developing software. He takes great pride in his versatility as a full-stack developer. As a freelancer, Jeffrey has a depth of knowledge from working on projects ranging from game development in Unity, mobile development for iOS and Android, web applications using Node.js and cloud technologies like AWS and Azure, and cutting-edge XR apps.
Jason has over a decade of experience in video games, virtual/augmented reality and 3D assets. He is an expert in the Unity Engine and can work with a wide variety of platforms (web, mobile, PC/Mac, game consoles). He prefers a multi-disciplinary approach—having a background in both game design and coding, as well as experience in audiovisual content creation pipelines.
Dan is a Unity developer with over six years of experience in most platforms, having deployed games and apps for PC, console, mobile, AR headsets, and custom platforms. As a Unity Certified Expert, Dan always looks forward to new, exciting projects that will challenge or enhance industry standards and stand the test of time.
Milos is a highly motivated game developer with expertise in the Unity game engine. He has successfully worked on multiple projects as a developer and gained solid experience in 3D, 2D, extended reality, augmented reality, virtual reality, visual effects, animations, and single-player and multiplayer games. Milos has published many games on App Store and Play Store.
Merkourios is an Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) applications developer using Unity3D. He is always looking forward to working on exciting projects that have a fresh perspective and add value in a unique way. Merkourios is at his best when developing challenging games and story-driven applications.
Dmitry is a VR/AR/XR and Unreal Engine expert with 15+ years of prior experience as a full-stack developer. He is a great communicator with a strong product vision who loves to help build excellent products and perfect them in every aspect. Dmitry has brought tens of products from scratch to the market and has delivered them to Vodafone, Pfizer, H&M, Accenture, BMW, and others.
Hakob is a machine learning expert and scientific programmer with substantial experience delivering analytics and predictive solutions for business and scientific applications. Additionally, he enjoys developing video games based on augmented reality and remote human-computer interaction paradigms. Hakob is fluent in Python and C++ and has worked as a consultant in a variety of projects, helping clients achieve their goals.
Ahmad is a certified Unity expert with more than a decade of experience as a software developer. Most of his experience was as a game developer and virtual reality (VR) specialist. He co-founded a VR agency in 2017, where he led a team of talented developers and artists to create virtual reality games and training experiences that meet the criteria set by his clients. Ahmad believes the true potential of VR is not limited to entertainment but also training and communication.
Vineet is a seasoned engine developer with 6+ years of experience, specializing in Unity and Unreal Engine. He has led teams in various augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and WebGL projects, successfully creating applications for iPhone, Android, Meta Quest, and Microsoft HoloLens 2. Passionate about merging tech with real-world impact, Vineet is eager to embrace new challenges, working hand-in-hand with clients to innovate with purpose.
Ibraheem is a passionate developer with a keen acumen for learning who solves unique and engaging tech problems, making great projects come to life. He has developed an escape room in a bus, a VR roller coaster, and an AR presentation tool for auto shows, just to name a few. He has proven experience in everything from programming languages and environments, mechatronics, computer animation, VFX, and CAD modeling to CFD and FEA analysis and even some welding and fabrication.
Because effective augmented reality developers have such a broad range of skills, it can be challenging to find the ideal AR developer with the specialties suitable for your project. Are you interested in hiring augmented reality developers? This handy guide provides various scenarios and solid interview questions to get you started.
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I am more than pleased with our experience with Toptal. The professional I got to work with was on the phone with me within a couple of hours. I knew after discussing my project with him that he was the candidate I wanted. I hired him immediately and he wasted no time in getting to my project, even going the extra mile by adding some great design elements that enhanced our overall look.
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How to Hire Augmented Reality Developers Through Toptal
1
Talk to One of Our Client Advisors
A Toptal client advisor will work with you to understand your goals, technical needs, and team dynamics.
2
Work With Hand-selected Talent
Within days, we'll introduce you to the right augmented reality developer for your project. Average time to match is under 24 hours.
3
The Right Fit, Guaranteed
Work with your new augmented reality developer for a trial period (pay only if satisfied), ensuring they're the right fit before starting the engagement.
Find Experts With Related Skills
Access a vast pool of skilled developers in our talent network and hire the top 3% within just 48 hours.
Typically, you can hire an augmented reality developer with Toptal in about 48 hours. For larger teams of talent or Managed Delivery, timelines may vary. Our talent matchers are highly skilled in the same fields they’re matching in—they’re not recruiters or HR reps. They’ll work with you to understand your goals, technical needs, and team dynamics, and match you with ideal candidates from our vetted global talent network.
Once you select your augmented reality developer, you’ll have a no-risk trial period to ensure they’re the perfect fit. Our matching process has a 98% trial-to-hire rate, so you can rest assured that you’re getting the best fit every time.
How do I hire an augmented reality developer?
To hire the right augmented reality developer, it’s important to evaluate a candidate’s experience, technical skills, and communication skills. You’ll also want to consider the fit with your particular industry, company, and project. Toptal’s rigorous screening process ensures that every member of our network has excellent experience and skills, and our team will match you with the perfect augmented reality developers for your project.
How are Toptal augmented reality developers different?
At Toptal, we thoroughly screen our augmented reality developers to ensure we only match you with the highest caliber of talent. Of the more than 200,000 people who apply to join the Toptal network each year, fewer than 3% make the cut.
In addition to screening for industry-leading expertise, we also assess candidates’ language and interpersonal skills to ensure that you have a smooth working relationship.
When you hire with Toptal, you’ll always work with world-class, custom-matched augmented reality developers ready to help you achieve your goals.
Can you hire augmented reality developers on an hourly basis or for project-based tasks?
You can hire augmented reality developers on an hourly, part-time, or full-time basis. Toptal can also manage the entire project from end-to-end with our Managed Delivery offering. Whether you hire an expert for a full- or part-time position, you’ll have the control and flexibility to scale your team up or down as your needs evolve. Our augmented reality developers can fully integrate into your existing team for a seamless working experience.
What is the no-risk trial period for Toptal augmented reality developers?
We make sure that each engagement between you and your augmented reality developer begins with a trial period of up to two weeks. This means that you have time to confirm the engagement will be successful. If you’re completely satisfied with the results, we’ll bill you for the time and continue the engagement for as long as you’d like. If you’re not completely satisfied, you won’t be billed. From there, we can either part ways, or we can provide you with another expert who may be a better fit and with whom we will begin a second, no-risk trial.
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How to Hire Augmented Reality Developers
This guide offers an overview of the concepts that an augmented reality (AR) developer candidate should be proficient in. Although it might seem straightforward, the constant innovations in this cutting-edge field can make hiring augmented reality app development experts a real challenge.
Considering that AR development can work by adding any combination of several forms of virtual elements to a real-world environment, you need first to define the category (or categories) that fit your project’s needs.
Marker-based Augmented Reality
As the name suggests, marker-based AR technology uses markers that serve as key points in a scene to enhance an image of the real world. The markers are usually made of a black-and-white image represented in a QR/2D code. They are given to the application as input making it easier to detect them when acquiring camera frames.
AR developer tasks in this particular field might include:
Calibrating the camera
Selecting a location that makes the task of finding the pattern on the markers easy
Ensuring that the least amount of shaking happens to the virtual objects when moving the camera around
Markerless Augmented Reality
Markerless AR image from David Malan, Getty Images
In the markerless approach, the strategy is totally different. Without markers, the data used in the application comes from other sources such as a GPS, a digital compass, or an accelerometer. As one may notice, since most smartphones are shipped with these sources, markerless AR technology is a perfect fit for mobile AR apps.
Projection-based Augmented Reality
Projection-based augmented reality consists of projecting an image onto a physical 3D model, in order to make it more realistic. It can be used to detect human interaction with the projected light. For a practical example, this could even be used to facilitate complex manual tasks on an assembly line.
We can also detect objects in a scene and change/augment them partially or totally. This is the premise of superimposition-based AR. It serves as a great alternative for applications that focus on enhancing the user experience with the virtual customization of an object. For instance, the user could try out different virtual furniture positioned in a room.
Having selected the category where your project fits in, it is now time to determine the desired AR developer technical skills according to your project requirements. The augmented reality developer is responsible not only for the code, but it is also expected to design assets and define or improve interfaces between your application and the users.
Augmenting a Real-world Environment
When hiring an augmented reality developer, the candidate should be confident in describing the steps behind augmenting a real-world environment. You can select two scenarios, one using markers and another one without them, and let them describe the challenges and solutions.
Explain, within the given scenarios, how you would augment the real world.
For the markers scenario, one challenge would be segmenting the markers from the rest of the scene. Your AR developer candidate should know these steps: prepare the image, get points and regions of interest, and then check if the detected regions (if any) have the pattern we are looking for.
To prepare the initial image, we apply a threshold so it becomes a binary image (0 or 1 values for each pixel). After that, we need to detect a feature in the markers to serve as a reference object. One common way of doing this is to use the corners of a square (with a QR/2D pattern) in the marker to serve as reference points.
There are many algorithms that can perform this matching on the scene. One example is the Harris Corner Detector algorithm. Following a mathematical approach, this algorithm can determine if a region is flat, an edge, or a corner. We are looking for any corners and edges, as they will be used in the next step. Specifically, we want to outline contours that can be fitted by four line segments forming squares/quadrangles.
With that information in hand, it’s time to make local descriptors for the extracted regions. They will be compared to the existing descriptors for the patterns we provided to the application. If we have a positive match, a marker was found and that 3D coordinate can be used to augment the scene with virtual objects.
For the marker-less scenario, besides the challenge of extracting desired features, there is also no information beforehand (no pattern comparison). One possible way to get these features is to extract screen patches that remain the same, regardless of changing viewpoint and/or illumination conditions.
We can extract these regions based on different characteristics, for instance, intensity and geometry. For geometry regions, a patch would exploit corners and edges (could use the same Harris algorithm). For intensity, we would select regions with local extrema in the image. Think of a center point of intensity extrema and from that point, we would cast rays in every direction. An invariant function is used to define the region boundary.
The extracted regions will be used to place information on the screen. There is no comparison with the database this time. This might seem like an easier task, but defining good regions without the help of a distinct marker is a real challenge. Any of these steps can be discussed with the candidate to grasp their knowledge of the subject.
Image Processing
No matter what category you pick, some level of image processing might be required. You can think of this as an attempt to modify an image to make it easier to extract information. A processing technique example can be seen in the image above. In order to get the finer details of the original image, we apply a filter to it—a high-pass filter in this case.
There are several challenges when processing images for input; you might have issues with colors, types of processing, filtering, varying illumination, shadows, etc. It really depends on the camera and the application.
The AR developer must be comfortable with image analysis or applying algorithms to digital images. Since this is a very broad subject, the important thing is to try and grasp the breadth of knowledge of the developer.
Briefly describe the challenges related to image processing in augmented reality application development. You can use any related fields of knowledge as examples.
Since image processing is a broad field of research, this is more of a general question. The answer should at least cover one major topic of concern. This includes but is not limited to:
Efficient encoding of images and video sequences
Computer vision, image acquisition, enhancement, restoration, and segmentation
Color processing, classification, and recognition in images
It’s more important to get a sense of the augmented reality development expert’s breadth of knowledge than to quiz them on specific details.
Tracking
Tracking is used to get the user’s viewpoint or the camera position and orientation. This represents a real challenge, and research is still being done on it.
Describe the approaches to doing object tracking in an augmented reality application.
We can separate the different approaches to tracking into three fields, namely sensor-based, vision-based, and hybrid tracking.
Sensor-based Tracking
As the name suggests, this type of tracking uses sensors such as accelerometer, mechanical gyroscope (these two are often collectively referred to as inertial tracking), GPS, or magnetic compass. These sensors have the advantage of being good at predicting motion when fast changes occur.
Vision-based Tracking
This approach uses image processing methods to calculate the camera pose. Usually, they can be further subdivided into model- or feature-based vision tracking.
For model-based tracking, a model of an object in the scene would be the reference for the tracking system. The 3D model needs to be provided beforehand. It can be a previously known 3D model or a model that was reconstructed from extracted scene features. In feature-based tracking, the references would be markers placed in the scene or natural features in the image.
Hybrid Tracking
This last category of tracking methods will be used when the others alone can’t handle the job in a desirable manner. In this case, the AR developer might need to combine different approaches to make the tracking more robust.
Imagine a situation where the conditions for the scene are not considered optimal. A user varies the scene conditions abruptly by rotating their smartphone when filming an urban scene with augmented information in labels. Using only vision-based tracking, it would be difficult to maintain robustness and accuracy in the application when displaying information on the scene.
This changes when more information is used, for instance, coming from the inertial tracking of a 3D gyroscope. Having a global orientation measured by the gyroscope can used to position the labels in the new scene in a precise manner, not having to depend only in the visual scene differences between frames—differences which would be huge in the scenario we just described.
Specific Tracking Knowledge
Besides asking about the AR app developer’s general knowledge in this subject, it’s also important to ask about specific challenges related to tracking. These may include illumination problems, occlusion, clutter, dynamic background, camera motion, the presence of shadows, etc.
Tell me how you would deal with a dynamic background when tracking an object in a scene.
The most common method to differentiate foreground objects from the rest of the scene is called background subtraction. The basic technique consists of subtracting the previous frame from the current frame and thresholding the result on each pixel.
This method may solve the problem right away with a static background, but for a dynamic one, we might need something more robust. Consider, for instance, a camera filming at different parts of the day, or different weather conditions, or even noise when acquiring the images from the camera. These factors need to be considered and the basic method needs to be improved.
One possible solution is to add an extra step before subtracting the current and previous frames. This step will be responsible for classifying each pixel as background or foreground. An example algorithm is the “Fuzzy C-means clustering” (FCM) algorithm.
The general process is to acquire a video, separate it into frames, convert the frames to grayscale, detect the desired features (edge detection), classify each pixel (extra step), and then subtract the previous frame from the current one. This will output the image without its background.
Application-specific Knowledge
It’s also important to know if the candidate has any background related to specific application requirements.
An example of this would be, for instance, an application that relies on facial recognition to put extra information on the screen. It would be interesting to evaluate candidates by their breadth of knowledge in algorithms related to detecting facial recognition.
Another common example would be a smartphone application that adds virtual objects to a street being filmed. In this scenario, it would be interesting to know if the AR developer has any background in enhancing images and/or recognizing streets using morphological algorithms.
You can give the developer an idea for an application and ask how they would implement it. For each initial requirement, try to ask for alternatives and the reasons why. Is the camera good enough? Is the device a problem? Do we need a specific asset? Is there any framework that works best in this scenario?
Augmented Reality Frameworks
When dealing with AR applications, we are not going to ask an augmented reality developer to build everything from scratch. There are several frameworks available, which take care of the basic stuff and let you build your application on top.
At this point, we already asked the developer about how to do things, and now it’s time to ask if they actually did it and what they used to achieve the tasks given.
Compare the augmented reality frameworks you know about, including advantages and disadvantages.
If you search the web, there are dozens of AR frameworks. You can browse a thorough comparison of features, but we are not going to pinpoint a single framework as the “best” one right from the get-go.
What’s interesting here is to know which framework suits your needs most closely. To find that framework, we are going to assume a list of features required by an example application and choose a framework with the best adherence from the list. Here, the developer’s experience can also make a difference when making this choice.
Our example application is going to target Unity 3D, and we need it to be a free or open-source framework. There are four known candidates that pop out from the list in this first query, namely: ARToolkit, Vuforia, Wikitude, and EasyAR.
For mobile app development, there are several frameworks for developing AR solutions, such as ARKit for iOS and ARCore for Android. AR programmers should be well-versed in programming languages like Swift, Objective-C, or Java, as well as experience with UX design. Cross-platform frameworks like Microsoft’s .NET MAUI can speed up mobile application development.
Describe the applications you have developed in the past. What framework(s) did you use?
These questions are related, and the objective here is to grasp the breadth of knowledge of the AR developer. Simply put, the more the better. We’ll be able to know if the developer has significant experience implementing augmented reality applications and if they are in tune with the newest changes in this field.
Pay Attention to Other Relevant Experience
Besides specific augmented reality knowledge, other types of previous experience might also be very useful and should be considered when you want to hire AR developers. For instance, keep an eye out for developers with good experience in 3D environments and VR development. Likewise, having people with great video/sound production skills on your project can really improve your users’ experiences. Candidates with years of experience in game development should also be considered. They create, in a sense, new worlds in AR/VR for us to exist in. Developing a full game, or even a game engine, promises knowledge in several topics that interest us. This includes cameras, textures, lighting, and UI/UX, as well as 3D engines like Unity and Unreal Engine.
Back to the Real World
This guide aims to give you the tools and general knowledge on how to hire a top-notch augmented reality app developer, whether you are in the U.S. or abroad and looking for part-time or full-time experts. But a guide is just a guide; the process of finding the “correct” candidate will still require your best discretion. In addition to technical skills, the most productive developers also will have a range of soft skills, such as communication and leadership.
If you are looking for new ideas and high-quality research related to AR technology, a good way to search for them is to attend (or read the papers published in) conferences and symposiums related to this subject, like ISMAR and IEEE Virtual Reality. There, you will find work from developers pushing the limits of this technology and adapting it to various industries such as healthcare, blockchain, and e-commerce.
The questions and answers presented here were made in such a way that it’s easy to abstract them into different problems or specialize them for specific situations. Ultimately, as the interviewer, only you can find the right mix of interview elements for the job you’re trying to fill. You know your AR project—trust your knowledge and your instincts, and you’ll know the ideal candidate when you meet them.