The first thing I had to decided when using unity was to decided which application I would prefer to use for AR. the two most popular solutions are Vuforia and ARKit.
Vuforia is a 3rd party plugin for unity which uses marker based tracking to augment object on your device. Vuforia allows us to place a target point your phone or device at the target and wham! we have tracking of the target. The advantages of Vuforia are the application could be deployed on any device, It was marker based so that marker could be used to provide context to the application, and it was also relatively light weight meaning it could be easily deployed to a mobile device. The disadvantages of Vuforia is that it was marker based. This mean that the device needed to be always pointed at the target so that the AR would work. This meant that the use was limited to the location of the AR target.
Vuforia Testing. Will Cottrell
The image above shows the initial testing phase I had with Vuforia. The image shows the target and the objects that have been placed in AR with reference to the target image. Vuforia allows anything to be a target as long as it’s on a plane. This will allow us the explore the us of the target to improve the AR experience. The image below shows the next step we took with Vuforia and scaling the objects.
The only issue we had with this was as the user moved a way the objects were too small to be seen on a phone screen. We need to take this into consideration when we develop the idea more.
ARKit is a built into the newest versions of iOS (10 and up) it is a natively supported markerless tracking for iOS this means that we could discard the marker and place the objects anywhere we like in relation to the real world. This is interesting as it would allow us to create a truly immersive experience. The user could walk around the solar system and see the planets up close and experience the effect of time dilation on the objects in AR. I decided to explore this side of AR as it allowed us to create some really interesting experiences for the user.
Above is a video showing the Markerless tracking of AR objects using ARKit for unity. This allows for a much more in depth experience as the objects stay in the same place and allows the user to move through them and change position much more freely that with marker based tracking. From these two initial test we decided we would go ahead with markerless tracking from ARKit as it allowed a better experience for the user, as they could use it anywhere they wanted to.
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