// the find
mapbox/react-native-mapbox-ar
Location based augmented reality components using React Native, Viro and Mapbox
A Mapbox-official React Native library for location-based AR, built on top of Viro (a now-dead AR framework from ViroMedia). It renders real-world terrain tiles in AR using Mapbox elevation data. Last touched in December 2019, so this is a museum piece.
The terrain tile approach is technically interesting — fetching elevation data from Mapbox and generating 3D mesh geometry on-device rather than relying on a cloud render. The math layer (Matrix3/4, Vector2/3, Face3, BufferGeometry) is implemented in both Java and Objective-C with proper parity, so the geometry pipeline isn't a black box. Separating the terrain fetch into an IntentService (Android) and TerrainService (iOS) is the right call for a blocking network+compute operation.
Viro (ViroReact) shut down in 2020 — the underlying AR renderer this depends on is dead, unmaintained, and won't build against modern React Native. The repo is 6+ years abandoned with no migration path offered. There's almost no actual library surface: one Terrain component and two modules is not a SDK. The README says 'more detailed instructions are on the way' and they never came — setup requires following Viro's own docs for a framework that no longer exists.