The problem
Glyptis started as a technical question. You build a sculpture out of colored voxels, and that sculpture is one file, owned by one author. A sculpture anchored in AR only means something at the place it is anchored, a plaza or a park. The same artwork needed to support many independent real-world instances, each anchored somewhere different, each open to its own local collaborators, without any of that touching the author’s original.
What I built
I worked on the voxel editor and the AR anchoring, alongside four other developers. The editor places blocks on an X/Y/Z grid. SceneKit drives the 3D view while ARKit takes the finished sculpture and anchors it to a point in the physical world, holding its position and orientation against the camera feed. The CloudKit sync layer and MapKit-based location browsing were built by the rest of the team.
Decisions that mattered
The model the team settled on treats a sculpture as one canonical artifact with any number of location-bound instances hanging off it. Editing an instance at one location never writes back to the author’s file or to any other instance, so each location is a fork. A group of people editing a sculpture anchored at one park bench can’t corrupt what the original author made, or what a different group is doing with the same sculpture across town.
On the AR side, the anchor had to hold up once someone walked around it. Respecting real position and orientation, rather than dropping a model in front of the camera, is what keeps the sculpture from drifting or wobbling as the camera moves.
What shipped
Glyptis is live on the App Store: a voxel editor that renders and anchors sculptures in AR, syncs them through CloudKit, and lets the same artwork have independent lives at different points on a map. Five developers, built during the Apple Developer Academy’s 2025 cohort.