ARKit LBS AR Application for Meituan Dining Experience

This article describes how Meituan’s dining service uses ARKit and location‑based services (LBS) to overlay virtual cards representing nearby restaurants onto the camera view, giving users an immersive AR experience.

ARKit provides the ARSession for motion tracking and a rendering engine (Metal, SpriteKit, or SceneKit). Tracking can be done with ARWorldTrackingConfiguration (6DoF) or AROrientationTrackingConfiguration (3DoF). Because the user‑restaurant distance is often hundreds of metres, high‑precision 6DoF tracking is unnecessary and sensitive to lighting and rapid motion, the team chose AROrientationTrackingConfiguration, which only tracks device attitude and works reliably even in low light or when the camera is covered.

To map real‑world coordinates into ARKit’s coordinate system, the article explains the three worldAlignment options. ARWorldAlignmentGravityAndHeading fixes the axes to true north, up, and east, allowing latitude/longitude positions to be correctly projected into the AR scene.

Restaurant cards are rendered with SceneKit. An SCNPlane sized to the card’s image becomes the geometry of an SCNNode. The node’s position is calculated from the user’s location using distanceFromLocation: to obtain east‑west (x) and north‑south (z) offsets, while the vertical (y) coordinate is derived from the restaurant’s floor height. SCNBillboardConstraint keeps the card facing the camera, and a simple linear mapping prevents near cards from overwhelming the view.

Overlap of many cards is handled in two ways. First, a tap‑to‑disperse interaction uses hitTest:options: to find overlapping cards and projectPoint:/unprojectPoint: to push them outward. Second, the backend clusters nearby restaurants with K‑Means so that a single card can represent several venues.

Because cards are thin billboards, depth buffering causes Z‑fighting and flicker when the camera angle changes slightly. The solution disables depth writes and reads on the card’s material:

plane.firstMaterial.writesToDepthBuffer = NO;
plane.firstMaterial.readsFromDepthBuffer = NO;

With depth buffering turned off, the flicker disappears without a noticeable impact on frame rate.

In summary, combining ARKit’s attitude tracking, SceneKit rendering, and thoughtful interaction design yields a stable, scalable AR LBS experience for Meituan’s dining users.