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Jurassic World Dinotracker AR was a free promotional app that used a phone camera to place digital dinosaurs in a user’s surroundings. It launched on August 16, 2022, alongside the home release of Jurassic World Dominion’s Extended Edition. Despite the shorthand “characters” in some headlines, the experience centered on dinosaurs—not human actors—and third-party store records indicate the app is no longer available through the main app stores.
A movie tie-in built around dinosaur sightings
NBCUniversal published Jurassic World Dinotracker AR as an interactive companion to Jurassic World Dominion. The film’s premise—dinosaurs living in the human world—became the app’s fictional assignment: users acted as trackers documenting creatures in places around them. It was a promotional AR experience rather than a conventional open-world game or a persistent location-based game like Pokémon GO. The launch announcement described it as a free worldwide release on iOS and Android. Trigger XR, Universal Pictures, Niantic, Qualcomm, LG Uplus and Korea’s KOCCA were among the partners credited in launch materials.
“Real spaces” meant the live camera view of a room or outdoor setting. The app placed 3D dinosaur models into that view, with the experience designed to present them at life-like scale. The models were digital overlays: no physical creature, human character or live-action actor was being inserted into the scene.
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The advertised flow began with scanning the surroundings so the app could identify surfaces and usable space. A footprint or tracking cue could lead into a dinosaur reveal; the user could then move around the creature, observe its behavior, interact with it where supported, and capture a photo or video. The project team’s development documentation describes the footprint-based reveal, while the launch announcement and Shorty Awards case study describe scanning, interactions and sharing.
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Species could be selected or unlocked in relation to the scene the app detected. Launch materials described, for example, flying creatures appearing in sky-oriented scenes and some animals being associated with grassy or larger open areas. This helped make the surroundings part of the fiction, rather than using the camera only as a background for a fixed sticker.
The dinosaurs in the launch announcement
The launch roster named Blue, Beta, Carnotaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex, Pteranodon, Dilophosaurus, Stygimoloch, Gallimimus, Nasutoceratops and Compsognathus. That is the list in the launch materials, not necessarily a verified complete catalogue of every creature ever available in the app. Blue and Beta are recognizable Jurassic World creatures; the rest of the list includes species presented as dinosaurs in the franchise’s fictional world.
What the AR technology did
The app used Niantic’s Lightship ARDK for environmental understanding and spatial AR. In practical terms, those capabilities helped it recognize surfaces, map aspects of the scene and place a creature in relation to the floor or other detected areas. Launch materials also describe environment-aware selection and placement, rather than a model simply appearing at an arbitrary point in the camera image.
Depth information enabled occlusion: a dinosaur could appear partly hidden behind a real obstruction, such as a wall, instead of always rendering visibly over everything. Environment meshing and walkable planes supported the illusion that a creature could move across suitable open areas or surface heights. Those techniques matter particularly for a large, life-like-scale model; an animal that intersects the room or floats above a floor quickly breaks the effect.
The creatures were animated and accompanied by audio, and the launch description says they reacted to a user’s proximity. Interaction included a laser to attract a dinosaur and feeding a Compsognathus by throwing food. According to the announcement, hand tracking for that feeding feature used Apple Core ML on iOS and Google MediaPipe on Android. Those are the launch materials’ descriptions of the implementation; they do not establish identical performance across all phones.
From camera encounter to campaign map
Dinotracker extended beyond an individual camera session. Users were encouraged to share sighting photos and videos, including with #dinotracker and #JurassicWorldDominion, and the campaign included a web-based map showing reports from other users. The map and social layer turned a private AR encounter into a collective promotional activity: fans could contribute sightings as if dinosaurs had spread across the globe.
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That map should be understood as a campaign-era feature, not a service readers can rely on today. Portfolio and fan references indicate the original site is defunct or redirects, but they do not establish a precise shutdown date or the status of every archived version.
Can you still download DinoTracker AR?
As of 2026, current official availability could not be confirmed. Third-party iOS archive Appshunter marks the app as archived and records it as a 2022-era release. Android directory AppBrain reports that it was removed from Google Play on October 28, 2025. These are not shutdown notices from Universal, Apple or Google, so the evidence supports saying the app appears delisted—not asserting an officially announced end date.
Archived records also list an iOS version 1.3 and iOS 14.0-or-later requirement. Those are historical metadata, not a current compatibility recommendation or proof that the app will run on a modern device. An old app package found on an unofficial download site is not an official, verified or necessarily safe route to access it. Even if a preserved copy launches, the campaign map, uploads or other online functions may no longer work.
Why the app was more than a camera filter
DinoTracker’s design joined several mobile AR challenges: placing a large model on a plausible surface, making it respond to the physical scene, allowing it to pass behind obstacles, and letting it behave as though it occupied the same space as the viewer. A simple camera filter can add a graphic to an image; this experience aimed for spatial placement, depth and interaction. Its main significance is as a technically ambitious, campaign-bound way to carry Dominion’s premise beyond the screen—not as an enduring game or currently supported app.
As with any camera-based AR experience, the design implies practical limits. A small room may be a poor fit for a large T. rex; clutter, dim light, reflective surfaces, featureless floors or quick camera movement can make it harder for an app to understand a scene. The launch materials do not provide a device-by-device compatibility table or measured performance claims, so these are design considerations, not reported test results. Outdoor users also need to keep their attention on traffic, terrain and property boundaries rather than walking while absorbed in the camera.
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