Official AR Foundation v5.0

What’s New in AR Foundation 5.0

Version 5.0 of AR Foundation is here and comes with several changes and new features. AR Foundation 5.0 works with Unity 2021LTS, Unity 2022.1 and is available in beta with Unity 2022.2.

Changes

• AR Session Origin is now deprecated and replaced by XR Origin, which is suitable for both AR and VR applications. XR Origin is part of the XR Core Utilities package, a new dependency of AR Foundation.
• The AR Subsystems package (com.unity.xr.arsubsystems) has been merged into com.unity.xr.arfoundation.

For more information on migrating your project to 5.0, see the AR Foundation migration documentation.

New Features

• XR Simulation allows you to run your AR app in Play mode by simulating an AR device, no longer requiring you to rebuild your app to test changes.
• AR Debug Menu is a new Prefab you can use to view available configurations on your device and visualize AR subsystem data such as planes and point cloud positions.
  

Requirements

• AR Foundation 5.0 requires Unity 2021LTS and later.

XR Simulation

AR Foundation can simulate an AR device, allowing the testing of AR enabled scenes in the Editor. In play mode you can navigate around a variety of simulated environments detecting planes, tracked images, etc. as if you are using a real device. You can also create your own environments to use in the simulation.

The following AR Foundation features are supported:



Enable simulation

Go to Project Settings > XR Plug-in Management > Windows, Mac, Linux and enable XR Simulation. When you enter Play Mode in the editor with a scene that contains an ARSession, a simulated environment is loaded. Click the right mouse button in the Game view to look around and press the W, A, S, and D keys to navigate around the environment.

As you navigate around the environment, AR Foundation discovers features of the simulated environment as if you were navigating around a real space. However, there are a few differences compared to using a real device:

• Planes: Planes are only discovered on axis aligned surfaces.
• Meshes: Meshes are all discovered immediately on entering play mode.
• Tracked images: Any tagged image in the simulation environment can be tracked regardless of what images are in your reference library. This allows testing without having to modify either your reference image library or the environment.

For more in-depth information on how to set up and work with AR Simulation, please refer to the AR Foundation Simulation documentation. You can also watch a tutorial from AR Content Creator and Founder of LearnXR, Dilmer Valecillos, on YouTube.

Unity Mars and Simulation

Unity Mars includes a simulation feature that can work with AR Foundation. Unity Mars’ Simulation System supports the same features as AR Foundation and more. We recommend that Unity Mars developers continue with Unity Mars simulation. Note that both Simulations features cannot be used at the same time.

XR Origin

ARSessionOrigin is now deprecated and is replaced by XROrigin. The XR Origin represents the center of worldspace in an XR scene. The purpose of the XR Origin is to transform objects and trackable features to their final position, orientation, and scale in the Unity scene. It specifies an Origin, a Camera Floor Offset Object, and a Camera.

For more information on migrating ARSessionOrigin to XROrigin, see the AR Foundation migration documentation.

AR Debug Menu

You can add the AR Foundation Debug Menu to an AR scene to visualize tracking information and available configurations. When that scene is active on a target device, you can use the menu to view the following information:

• Stats Info
  • FPS
  • Tracking Mode
• Session Configurations
• Debug Options
  • XR Origin
  • Planes
  • Anchors
  • Point Clouds

The AR Debug menu works with any scene that contains an ARSession, an XROrigin, and a Camera.

The Debug menu is a Prefab object containing the ARDebugMenu script and a set of GameObjects and components that provide the UI. See Setting up the menu for instructions to add the Debug menu to a scene.

Setting up the menu

To create an out-of-the-box fully configured debug menu, right-click anywhere in the Hierarchy window and select XR > AR Debug Menu.



The AR Debug menu appears as a toolbar that is anchored either to the left or bottom side of the screen.

Stats Info

The Stats Info tab provides general information about a session, including current FPS and TrackingMode.



Session Configurations

The Session Configurations tab displays all the available session Configurations for a specific platform and highlights the currently active configuration.



Debug Options

The Debug Options tab allows the user to toggle visualizers for various ARTrackables in the scene.

 

ARCore itself doesn't support meshing the way ARKit does, hence why it's not supported. However depending on what you are trying to achieve you might find the depth image useful.

 

AR Foundation 4.2.3 is still the verified version for Unity 2021.3 (LTS). However, you can manually update the entry

"com.unity.xr.arfoundation": "4.2.3"

in the

Packages/manifest.json

file in your Unity project to point to the "5.0.0-pre.13" version of the package. You might need to update the versions for

com.unity.xr.arcore

and

com.unity.xr.arkit

packages as well.

AR Foundation 5.0 full-release is on the way and will be available in the package manager soon. Right now, 5.0.0-pre.13 is the latest publicly available version of the package.

 

@Stents - Fair point. We could have been clear that at the time of writing this post, pre.13 is available and 5.0.0 is in QA, soon to be released. And thank you for all your feedback. I will pass your feedback about the package manager's handling of non verified versions to the internal team at Unity.

 

I have good news, 5.0.2 is now available. AR Foundation samples have been updated to point to the 5.0.2 versions of the AR Foundation packages.

 

Yes, that's on our roadmap - so you can expect it but I can't give you a when right now.

 

@afurioso

We have a docs update coming soon that walks through this. The easiest way is to add the package by name: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/upm-ui-quick.html

Package name is

com.unity.xr.arfoundation

.

Latest version at time of writing is 5.0.2, but you can always check the latest published version at this URL: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.xr.arfoundation@latest

 

@JelmerV Thanks for asking as this is a common pain point. See my message above for how to access AR Foundation 5.0.2 in Unity 2021.3. At the time of writing, we are in the release process for 5.0.3, which includes a documentation update addressing this topic.

 

Hi @JelmerV

For your 2021.3 issue, make sure that you have the same version numbers installed for the following packages:

• com.unity.xr.arfoundation
• com.unity.xr.arkit
• com.unity.xr.arcore

When upgrading to AR Foundation 5, you should remove the following packages as stated in step 4 of that new docs page:

• com.unity.xr.arsubsystems // this assembly has been merged into AR Foundation in 5.0
• com.unity.xr.arkit-face-tracking // this assembly has been merged into the ARKit package in 5.0

For more information see our Migration Guide.

Thanks for pointing out the error regarding our documentation of Unity 2022.1. You still need to manually add AR Foundation 5.0 to your manifest in that version. AR Foundation 5.0 is in "Released" status as of Unity 2022.2, so 2022.2 is the first Editor where it appears in the package manager, and we'll update our docs to correctly reflect that.

 

@Gmora7 If you move your device with high acceleration then it can indeed be possible for objects to drift. That's primarily what I see when I watch this video.

"100% stable placement" as you've described it is not even theoretically possible with any realtime visually based tracking system. There will always be factors like lighting conditions, feature point density, sensor noise, vibrations, etc, that will cause some margin of tracking error.

Note also that Unity does not provide an implementation of device tracking-- this comes from provider implementations such as Google's ARCore and Apple's ARKit. Neither Apple nor Google release any official numbers about their tracking precision.

As a recommendation if you aren't already doing so, tracking stability will always improve if your cube is anchored using a standalone Anchor as opposed to attaching the anchor to a plane (or simply parenting the cube as a child of the plane GameObject). You should always use Anchors when stability of object placement is your goal.

 

This is not true. There was a different iOS 16-related rendering bug in our ARKit plug-in package, but with the release of our latest patches we are unaware of any iOS 16-specific rendering issues.

 

@dandanthepizzaman666

From our docs:

The AR Foundation package contains interfaces for AR features, but doesn't implement any features itself.

Both AR Foundation 4 and AR Foundation 5 use ARKit's image tracking implementation on iOS. To reason about image tracking on iOS, we must look at Apple's documentation.

Apple's guidance states:

Limit the number of reference images in use at one time. Image detection performance works best when ARKit looks for 100 or fewer distinct images in the real-world environment.

We made no changes to the Apple ARKit XR Plug-in's Image Tracking implementation with the release of AR Foundation 5.

Note that tracking instability can be caused by incorrect texture import settings for non-power of two (NPOT) textures. For more information, see our docs: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/c...#reference-images-and-texture-import-settings.

If you are still experiencing issues with image tracking on iOS 16, it is possible that Apple made a change in iOS 16 that affected your app. In that case you can file a bug with Apple: https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/.

 

Hi @Kasperknop

Thanks for these videos. I can't tell by looking if this is an issue with AR Foundation or ARCore but this does appear to be some sort of regression. Can you please file a bug and post the bug number here? https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/bug-reporting

 

@dandanthepizzaman666

Looking at your reference image again, I question how you came to the determination that this was a "good quality" reference image? Xcode has a reference image quality assessment tool:

Not all images are equally suited for using them as ARReferenceImages. Good reference images typically have high contrast, good texture, clear edges, and are printed on a flat, non-glossy surface. Low-texture and low-contrast images will likely not work so well. When you add reference images to an ARResourceGroup in an Xcode asset catalog, Xcode will show quality estimation warnings, which may provide additional insights about the specific issue with that particular image.

In some cases, you can try using an image editing tool to tweak contrast, exposure, or emphasize edges. Depending on the subject, cropping may work as well. For example, a picture showing mostly a blue sky with a small airplane could be cropped to just the region showing the airplane. If you can't get detection to work at all for a particular image, you probably need to consider replacing it.

In particular I've seen developers struggle with images on a solid-colored background. This violates the "clear edges" requirement described above. I would suggest trying some different images and/or verifying the quality in Xcode to ensure that your tracking issue is not caused by reference image quality.

 

@Kasperknop
Which Android device, android OS version, and ARCore APK version did you use to test the two AR Foundation versions in your videos?

 

@arnesso We've also noticed this. We have an open investigation right now, but it's trickier than we expected and may require a change to the Editor. We don't have an ETA for a fix, but if you wish to file a bug you and other community members can track the progress.

 

@newguy123 Yes unfortunately this is a longstanding issue with URP 14. Thankfully they resolved the issue recently. This fix will be live in 2022.2.2f1.

In the meantime you can work around this issue by changing your camera manager's background rendering mode to After Opaques as explained here: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/c...ramanager-and-xrcamerabackgroundrenderingmode

 

@DiogoSB You can find Google's list of ARCore supported devices here: https://developers.google.com/ar/devices

For devices on that list, if you are having trouble getting your app to launch correctly, make sure that you've covered all the steps in our ARCore Project Configuration guide: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.xr.arcore@5.0/manual/project-configuration-arcore.html

As an alternate starting point, our Samples app should work out of the box on supported ARCore devices: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/arfoundation-samples

 

@newguy123 This is on the road map. We're not ready to do this immediately but possibly sometime in 2023.

 

@seyfe XR Simulation support for CpuImages will be in our next 5.1 pre-release build in January.

 

@Dangers_Dad Please limit your forum activity to one thread per issue. This thread is about our August 2022 announcement of AR Foundation 5-- I have responded to your other thread.