AR development with Vuforia

In case you missed it, we've partnered with Vuforia to integrate their Augmented Reality development tools with Unity. If you are interested in getting started with AR or have any questions about this functionality, please post it on this thread.

For more details, check out the blog.

To get started, download the Vuforia AR Starter Kit and also get a free Vuforia Development license. Once you have both, follow the steps outlined in this Starter Kit Guide from Vuforia.

 

Hello,

I have a feature request from Vuforia and it's important for a future commercial project:
Add the possibility to track an object from a custom point-set given by me, created in a 3D modeling tool like Blender of 3DMax, instead of let’s say from that “limiting” app called Vuforia Object Scanner. If Vuforia can track objects using the point-data generated from Vuforia Object Scanner, than what I requested definitely can work.

Thank you
Regards

 

Are these point sets you are creating in Blender a/o 3ds Max, or are you using a 3D capture solution to produce point clouds, by scanning real objects, that you then import to these tools?

As you know, our Object Recognition relies on a scanning app that we provide to capture the object and produce a data representation that can be used to recognize and track the object. There is currently no support for generating these datasets from other sources.

Can you describe your use case? Is the object scanner we provide limiting because of the source of your object representation?

 

Hello,
The answer on your forums was No to object recognition of a real live car and that it's limited to small object like toys.
I know that other people are doing this (most probably with OpenCV) by providing the datasets from a well made 3D representation of that car (in 3DMax or other 3D modelling app).
I am not a compute vision programmer, I am an Unity Developer and this is where Vuforia helped me with a prior project for a client. But now, for this future project, it's not helping me.

What I need is a conversion from a 3D model (fbx or obj) to your datasets that can recognize the real object.

Thank you

 

It will be great to have Vuforia support inside unity.

A very useful feature to add would be the marker-less augmentation, this has many useful applications and I think this feature would give a boost to AR apps.

Thank you for integrating Vuforia.

 

Katoun - I've communicated your request and requirements to my team. We've seen a lot of interest in the capability you've identified.

Stay tuned. If we introduce a new feature of this sort we'll be sure to announce it through the Unity community.

 

amjadyahya1 - This is another popular feature request that we're looking into.

Also have you looked into our User Defined Targets feature - it enables you to capture an image at runtime and use it as a target.

 

Super,
Thank you

 

Hi @aliceingameland (Unity) and @Augmenteer (vuforia),
we've been using vuforia for nearly two years now and we've made several iOS and Android Apps. We've started every App development on one of the samples provided by vuforia (https://developer.vuforia.com/downloads/samples).
Now I would like to get a little bit more info about the news, especially about this:

1. Is this gonna happen automatically?
2. Is there a roadmap for these improvements? How can I stay updated?
3. Is the Vuforia AR Starter Kit already an improvement over the vuforia samples (https://developer.vuforia.com/downloads/samples)?
4. Should I use the Vuforia AR Starter Kit instead of the samples on the vuforia website?

Thanks

 

I dont see any of this mentioned in the official Unity roadmap?! https://unity3d.com/unity/roadmap

 

Excellent question, I would like to see the answer also...the biggest problem we have had is the overhead in juggling Vuforia, Unity and Hololens support as each item changes / tweaks along the way. The modified sample projects we use for test broke during the last upgrade to Vuforia 6.2 because we missed the buried migration link (http://library.vuforia.com/articles/Solution/Migrating-Unity-Projects-to-Vuforia-6-2) that indicated all the changes that had to be made before opening the project in Unity. Likewise, Unity's special Hololens version is where we do our Holo development so far, worried that the migration path to 5.5 will have similar hiccups.

 

Hi @aliceingameland , I'm trying to use vuforia for my app. It works great on editor and iOS device, but has some issue with multiple scenes.

Currently I have 2 Scenes. One for main game and one for camera calibration.
Both scenes use Vuforia and have ARCamera prefab.

The symptom is, when I load scene from one to another,

Code (CSharp):

1. CameraDevice.Instance.GetCameraImage(pixelFormat)

no longer updates images. It returns the very last image which had been captured just before the first scene loading was started.

I've added callback methods on VuforiaBehaviour.StartEvent, UpdateEvent, etc. And found out that except the first scene(at the beginning of the application) Vuforia never trigger StartEvent even if the 'StartVuforia' log appears after scene loading is completed. So I added an IEnumerator that registers pixel format a few seconds later the scene loading. And it works fine but CameraDevice.Instance.GetCameraImage() still doesn't give the latest image.

++ oh, this doesn't happen in the Editor. My app works as expected in the Editor. It only happens on the device (iOS)

 

Hi @Augmenteer, I've been doing some experiments with Vuforia's image target tracking, and for the most part, I've been really impressed with the performance. I was surprised to see when profiling, though, that there was an almost 1MB allocation each frame coming from the WebCamTexture.GetPixels32 method. Even in Unity 5.4, which is the minimum required for your plugin, that method can take an optional buffer parameter to store the Color32[] result. This is an easy fix, and would drastically cut down memory allocations and get rid of the frequent spikes from the garbage collector while the video feed is running.

I was hoping to make that change myself, but it's buried in the dll. I realize this may not be a priority for you guys at the moment, given the upcoming Unity integration, but I just wanted to make sure you were aware of it. Anyway, thanks for reading, and hopefully I'll be using Vuforia more in the future.

 

is the integration just an asset store partnership still as an external plugin, or a deeper integration - comparable to mecanim acquisition. if the latter, which version of Unity would vuforia be enabled right from a Unity editor window?

 

Hi Vuforia users, i have the try licence to play with, and it works really fine until i build the app,
Then i can't seems to be able to access the camera it previously acces without any troubles.
i was told its a problem of 32 bits / 64 bits version of unity, vuforia seems not to be able to build correctly in 64 bits unity.
is that a fact and if it is is there a roadmap on this ?
a apologize if the question was already ask.

 

@jexmatex ; No that's not true I have often build Vuforia into 64 bits app. As far as I know that's the only way your apps will get accepted on the iOS platform! But having said that, I would advice using Arcolib. It's a new Unity asset. And it's very promising an getting better and better at a rapid pace. It's cheaper ( for commercial usage ) and way more developer friendly. Arcolib is now my first choice for all our AR projects. I hope Unity will notice it too and drop the strategic collaboration with PTC and buy Arcolib.

 

Interesting! It does seem easier on the dev side but how does it fare performance-wise to Vuforia? Not impressed with their demo video, due to the laggy performance - but do you have better results?

 

@ina Arcolib is performance-wise ( 2D target tracking quality ) better than the video suggests and is rapidly becoming better and better. And more important @yezaldivar is listening to it's users and responding to their feature requests. We've done plenty of Vuforia projects but we have to say that their price-quality ratio is embarrassing. (We used to work with the far superior Metaio technology stack before it was bought by Apple.) The price-service ratio is ridiculously bad. Over the last year I have spend more than $5489,= on Vuforia Classic licenses ( a $499 license per app! ) for features that are now almost free with @yezaldivar 's Arcolib AR components. And if you buy the Arcolib asset you can use it unlimited in any way that you like instead of being limited by al sorts of ridiculous Vuforia restrictions. When we recently tried to use Vuforia on a Microsoft Surface tablet we discovered that you need to use their UWP export option ( they don't offer Windows Standalone support ) and for that scenario you need to contact a Vuforia pricing specialist. I'm not kidding you, the cheapest price option for that scenario is a consumer pro license ; $2500,= per app. But this license comes with all sorts of restrictions on it's usage. Get this ; Arcolib is now only $41.25 and will always stay below $100,= and it will include UWP support in the future with no restrictions on the usage. I have contacted @yezaldivar with ideas for helping Vuforia users in transitioning from Vuforia projects to Arcolib projects and he's already implementing features to smoothen that proces for us. I'm very busy with other stuff at the moment but I'm looking forward to posting examples of my results with Arcolib at a later time.

 

I agree with all of your issues with Vuforia - including their ridiculous sales cycle where two separate sales people insist on scheduling phone meetings with you before they will even tell you the price - and this is where i've already indicated that it would be for a hobbyist project, where the entire budget is basically nothing - and even then, the absolute lowest cost of UWP license is $2500.

Hope to support Arcolib, but also concerned about whether they might go metaio's way to apple

 

thank for that Theo i'm gonna check

 

I would like to know when or how can this scanner app be available for IOS, I am stuck on my project due to this.

 

Hello @NGC6543,

Apologies for the very late response but I did want to follow up on the issue you've reported. I wanted to confirm the version of the Vuforia Extension that you used when this observation was made. Note that in Vuforia 6.2, the concept of a single, global ARCamera was introduced:

https://library.vuforia.com/articles/Training/Changes-to-the-Unity-ARCamera-with-Vuforia-6-2

Thanks!

 

Hello @Bunderant,

Thank you for the feedback. I will open an investigation into your observations with the core engineering team, and provide relevant updates once they are available.

Thanks.

 

Hi,
I used the Vuforia 6.2.6 at the time. I had to re-initialize webcam by release pixel format and register pixel format again.

 

Hello,

The development team did some investigation to better understand your observations, yet was unable to identify the WebCamTexture.GetPixels32 method in Vuforia's implementation.

We will look further into the possibility of optimizing the Play Mode feature for Vuforia. Thank you for your interest and feedback.

 

Hello. I wanted to know how can I build a PC Standalone application using vuforia.

I'm, currently using Untiy 2017.2 and imported vuforia form the XR Settings, Although I don't get any errors on build, the screen is completely black when I run it and the webcam doesn't turn on.

Thank you.

 

Hi Ga2Z,
we're using vuforia for several years. As far as I know it's not possible to create a PC standalone app. You can use a webcam to test on PC within the editor, but standalone wasn't possible in the past. I would be suprised if I missed to announcement/option that it's possible (now).

Cheers

 

Hello,

Thank you very much for your interest in Vuforia. I can confirm AM-Dev's response that the Vuforia SDK currently does not support PC standalone applications.

For a list of supported devices and compatibility with the latest commercial version of the SDK, please see the following resource pages:
https://vuforia.com/devices.html
https://library.vuforia.com/articles/Solution/Vuforia-Supported-Versions

Thanks,
-Vuforia Support