Vuforia vs Metaio?

Does anyone have experience with both Vuforia and Metaio?
Which one is better?
Is there any example project of Metaio AR using Unity3D?

 

bump!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Hi,

Both Vuforia and Metaio provide resources for developers.
Both platforms are pretty equal in 2D image tracking with Unity.

The difference comes with 3D tracking. Metaio seems to be the leader in this now with their various types- Edge based, point cloud, etc.

I've mostly looked at Metaio because they provide a specific tutorial on how to get started with building a simple game.

Again, the main differences I've seen come in the 3D tracking and the support provided by Metaio. They have free tutorials, demos, and free webinars. They've done a few on Unity: http://dev.metaio.com/webinars/development/

Also, an example of an experience being build on Metaio with Unity would be the Kimberly Clark Big Kids App
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pullups.bigkid&hl=en
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pull-ups*-big-kid-app/id573089239?mt=8

Hope that helps.

 

I use to work with Vuforia, and never been disappointed.
Good SDK, good documentation, good resource, etc...

 

I worked with vuforia over 1 year, it's easy to use at the first time.
With metaio, I tried but cannot find documents with example in somedays, it look like complicated

 

This has basically been my experience too. No documentation, examples that didn't work, and no testing in the editor. I'd say stick to Vuforia unless you absolutely need the 3D tracking.

 

Are you using this? http://dev.metaio.com/sdk/tutorials/unity-game/ They recently added this.


The documentation was pretty S***ty before on the wiki page- http://docs.metaio.com/bin/view/Main/WebHome this is completely outdated. I don't know why they don't delete it.

Again, 2D wise, they're pretty equal, but I use Metaio for the 3D tracking.

 

It seems like Metaio has a lot more features than Vuforia, but it is much more difficult to get implemented from scratch because of the lack of updated tutorials and documentation. Besides what @AR_Nerd posted are there any 3rd part tutorial/resources for setting up Metaio in Unity, because right now it seems like there aren't any.

 

For the record/anyone who finds this forum in 2015:
Metaio *seems* to still be a bit more feature rich, but is:
1. very unity-hostile, including it in the project is relatively straightforward, and the unity component of tracking camera seems/is intended to be working out of the box, by just drag&drop, but usually doesn't. No real API calls are provided for unity, no clear entrypoints to attach your code on, no real documentation or help for unity (just for low-level usage in Java directly, calls that are not necessary nor accessible in unity)

2. versions higher than 5.2 don't support non-neon devices, and the 5.2 version's 3d tracking is hard to set up, as their software intended for creation of point clouds has no way of debugging why your pointcloud doesn't work or how to improve it (the latest version does have this feature, and shows a nice visualization of the whole process and you can tweak it on the fly, but that one doesn't work on non-NEON devices)

3. steals the rendering from unity, uses its internal renderer (at least for the device camera image and the model stuck on the marker), needs whole unity to be in OpenGL mode for that, and this makes it unwieldy and needlessly complicated when you need it to draw some custom objects in addition to the augmented one (which is kind of all the time).

4. even when it tracks successfully, at least the "move camera around object" setting moves the camera erratically in pretty insane ways; the final rendered image+object is positioned correctly (after some tweaks), but the camera is crazy and illogical (in our tests it used to flip rendering camera upside-down around (unity's) z-axis, and would randomly flip it back into correct orientation while also making it jump to the other side of the object, and such ridiculous stuff...)

5. the tracking stability of the image markers seems... wiggly

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compared to that:
1. vuforia can be included into a unity project by importing their package, which is awesome. Entrypoints for your own code are very clear and simple, has the needed event functions similar to MonoBehavior, no tutorial needed to find the places and ways to stick your own code, fully customizable if you need to. (offline) tracking data from the page is generated as a .unitypackage as well and after including in the project all the settings are there in inspector, in dropdowns (which tracking database and targets to use, etc).

2. vuforia takes care to be able to run even on low-end devices, so even the latest version still supports non-NEON devices (the object mapper utility requires NEON and android 4.2 or higher though). The mapper also nicely shows what it's mapping and where the points are, and lets you test the pointcloud.

3. doesn't steal rendering from unity, can run in DX mode too, everything that happens happens with unityObject, to put it short, integration with Unity is awesome

4. virtual camera movements make sense and map basically 1:1 to movement of the physical camera/device

5. tracking stability of image markers is great, 3d objects we haven't tested enough to tell yet, but at least we got it to work in about half an hour (from starting the object scanner to having a running unity app tracking the object and augmenting it), compared to metaio where it took almost a whole day and we still had problems with initial finding of the object and had no idea why (after trying about 10 different versions of blender-custom-made 3D tracking sources, and 10 pointclouds generated from their soft)

6. documentation exists specific for unity, and sometimes explains almost too trivial stuff that doesn't really need to be explained, but you don't even really need the docs, because the lib's interface is so simple and clear you can understand it in about 5 minutes of rummaging throug the files provided in the .unitypackage.

--

so i would say: metaio might be good if you're doing native java apps, but for use with unity, Vuforia is *THE WAY TO GO*, no question.

Also, as of few months ago, Smart Terrain feature.

--------
Miroslav Martinovič
Developer at INOVE
http://inove.eu.com