The print spec decides whether the AR works.
Image tracking matches what the camera sees against the artwork it was given. Anything that changes what the camera sees — a gloss finish throwing a highlight, a laminate catching a ceiling light, a print too small to resolve its own detail — breaks that match before any software gets a say. Three finish choices and one size decision cover almost every failure we see.
The three that cause trouble.
All for the same reason: a specular highlight is the camera seeing the room instead of the artwork, and the tracker has nothing to match against a reflection.
The worst of the three, because it affects the whole surface. Under a single bright light a gloss print can lose a third of its area to one highlight, and the highlight moves as the viewer does — so the tracker loses a different third each frame. Silk or matte stock removes the problem outright.
Often added late, for durability on cards and menus, and it converts a perfectly trackable matte print into a mirror. Matte or soft-touch lamination protects just as well and keeps the artwork visible. If a print run must be laminated, this is the single most valuable sentence to send the printer.
Localised rather than total, which makes it sneakier: the piece looks fine and only the treated area misbehaves. That is fine over a border or a logo and bad over the busy region the tracker relies on. Keep the shiny treatment off the detailed part of the image.
Why there is a genuine minimum.
Not a licence tier or an arbitrary limit — a consequence of how much detail survives the pipeline.
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The reference is reduced to 400 pixels
Before tracking begins, the artwork is scaled so its longest side is 400 pixels. That is deliberate: it is what makes matching fast enough to run thirty times a second on a mid-range phone.
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So detail finer than about three pixels is gone
Anything that only exists below that scale — fine hatching, small type, delicate texture — is not something the tracker ever sees. It is not weighted less; it is absent.
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Which sets a floor on print size and viewing distance
A business card held at arm’s length puts far fewer usable pixels in frame than a poster across a room. When a piece is too small or the phone too far, the honest answer is to move closer — no setting recovers information the camera never captured.
The companion question — how to shoot the reference photo in the first place — is photographing artwork for AR.
What tracks well, independent of the printer.
Tracking needs points that are distinguishable from one another. Painterly texture, illustration detail and asymmetric composition supply thousands of them. This is why a densely illustrated card tracks better than a beautiful minimalist one.
A field of one colour contains no locatable points at all. A design that is mostly flat with detail in one corner will track from that corner only, which is fragile — detail spread across the piece is worth more than the same detail concentrated.
A regular grid, a lattice, an evenly tiled background: every point looks like every other point, so matches land in the wrong places and the overlay snaps between positions. Break the repetition somewhere, or track something else on the piece.
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Check a design before you print it.
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Questions, answered.
It can, and it is the most common physical cause we see. A gloss surface reflects the light around it, so under a bright lamp part of the artwork is replaced by a highlight that moves with the viewer. The tracker matches what the camera sees, and a reflection is not the artwork. Matte or silk stock avoids it entirely.
Yes, with matte or soft-touch lamination. Gloss lamination turns a trackable matte print into a mirror and is a common late-stage mistake, because lamination is usually chosen for durability after the artwork is signed off. Say "matte lamination" on the print order and the problem does not arise.
Small enough is a question about detail, not dimensions. The tracking reference is reduced to 400 pixels on its longest side, so detail finer than roughly three pixels at that scale is unavailable to the tracker. A busy business card works; a sparse one at the same size may not, and the fix is to hold the phone closer rather than to change a setting.
Because repetition makes points indistinguishable. Matching works by finding which point in view is which point on the artwork, and in a regular grid every candidate looks equally good, so matches land in the wrong places and the overlay jumps. Irregular, asymmetric detail is what tracking wants.
No, and normally it should not be. The code is the doorway and the artwork is the marker, so the code usually sits beside the piece — on the wall label, the back of the card, the corner of the flyer. The exception is a code built out of the artwork itself, which can do both jobs at once.