Question Hot to reduce battery drain of AR app?

We have an AR app that only uses a subset of AR features, i.e. world-tracking and anchors. However, battery drain is huge, the devices are getting hot, and users are complaining about it.

So I've been looking for a way to optimize this. I found this old video from 2018:

However, none of these things help much. I tested battery drain on both an iPhone 12 Pro Max and a Mi 9 over a period of 30 minutes app activity with a fully charged battery. Both devices only showed slight improvements, if I reduced the frame rate and screen resolution:

* iPhone: battery level 89 instead of 88
* Mi9: battery level 62 (identical)

I also found some explanations that it would be good to disable plane tracking, but we're not using it.

So I am a bit clueless how we could further improve this. Are there any websites / videos with more up-to-date insights out there?

 

I'm using a Pixel 7 and it becomes hot after five minutes. I suspect most of the heat comes from the compositing of the camera feed and the rendered frame buffer and so there's not really anything we can do about it.

Maybe there's room for improvement at the chip design stage where it's possible to have dedicated circuitry that can combine the frame buffers more efficiently.

I think future AR devices are going to need large batteries and to be air cooled, which means they'll need to be a small box that's clipped onto a user's waist belt.

The Sony Walkman returns!.

 

Also, scanning a large frame buffer 60 times a second for feature points with a CPU is going be very demanding. Probably more so than the compositing that I mentioned above. So make sure you're also lowering your camera's resolution and frame rate and not just your rendering frame rate.

 

Good point. How can this be achieved?

 

With ARCore I believe it's done with extensions.

https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/unity-arf/camera-configs

Please let me know how it goes because I'm also curious about this.