What's your thought about EasyAR?

I've been wondering why EasyAR doesn't get much mentions anywhere in this forum, while technically it blows Vuforia in terms of price.

EasyAR allows you to use image tracking and other features for free and without watermarks, contrast to Vuforia which limits you to certain amount of installs (cmiiw). Also EasyAR doesn't need you to use online service to generate tracking data from images, just set a path to local image target on your project and that's it.

I've tested their sample app and personally I think it works pretty well... I haven't had much experience with Vuforia but I think EasyAR image tracking is passable for its price.

Is there something I'm missing of why people use Vuforia more other than it's being included with Unity?

 

I've been using it and it works great. But for my purpose, well...
I need to access the current camera image on occasion. And the EasyAR offers an event for the frame update. But it has a memory leak(or at leat the way I've implemented it) causes memory leak on the native(unmanaged) side.
I've posted the EasyAR community forum for help, but after half a month the developer simply ignored it.

Well, that's what free sdk is for.

 

Have not used or tested the latest version, but the tracking are bit inferior compare to Vuforia.
Just dump both since ARCore has image tracking capability now.

 

Yes, that could be the solution for mobile but on standalone, EasyAR is still one of the most
competitive options in market, I think.

 

Speaking of ARCore's image tracking, has anyone actually figured out how to do it? I started working on ARCore but I switched to EasyAR because Google's Augment Image documentation falls short and no one online seems to have explained how to do it yet. If anybody actually knows or knows of a place that explains how to do it (and not the official Google documentation, because it basically says "go read the script and figure out the rest" at the end), I would greatly appreciate it!

 

I've used Easy AR (among many other candidates) and found it to be quite robust, and you're right, Vuforia's licensing can sneak up on you and suddenly cost substantially more than you anticipate.

If you're working with pre-defined markers, Easy AR is absolute fine (we've had it subjected to >50 hours of testing when evaluating it against Vuforia, ARToolkit and some others), and their license is extremely reasonable.

 

Do you have any suggestions for reducing jitter in EasyAR? I have a 4-star target according to their own tracker checker, but it is still extremely jittery. You probably know more about the platform than I do.

 

The detection also can also be affected by the resolution of your camera device, background or the size of the target. Try tracking the target 'close', or without any distracting background(clean wall, maybe?). If that make changes, you'd better consider changing the marker design.

 

When you're dealing with AR, and things jitter, there's a few approaches.

1. Improve your marker design.
2. Check all your tracking settings
3. Think about your relative scales. The size ratio between your marker and your virtual object is important. The bigger the object relative to tracker, the more jittery it'll be due to scale multiplication on angles.
4. Smooth the resulting track (you can do this by using a different camera that lerp's toward the other one, etc).

I almost always smooth the resulting tracking solution. From a technical standpoint, it's wrong, but most users will say 'it's really jittery', but they won't say 'it's about a frame behind', they're less attuned to 16 to 32ms of latency than they are to an object wobbling a few degrees every frame.

 

Does easyar support changing of image target on runtime?

 

I'm also looking for that only, you can go with cloud recognition but that was not open source

 

I started using EasyAR since the 2.2 version (it is a good product). (IMHO) the reason why EasyAR is not so common here is because their support/docs/tutorial/forum is poor. There ain't no great community, their Q&A section is often under spam attack, you have to wait a lot for answers... (and they don't always come).

 

Yea their customer support falls short for most times, the api looks like its made from few opengl papers but it works and its kinda free so we use it.

 

someone mentioned ARCore that is also free... Yes ... BUT.... Only a small number of Android phones support ARCore. If you want to build an AR app for the masses then you cannot say to the customer "sorry but you need to buy another phone". That's ARCore's biggest limitation and Google should do something about that. Whereas EasyAR runs on every modern Android phone in existence.

 

Im trying to make an AR game where you can roll a ball through a maze by tilting the business card you're tracking, but the ball won't move. It's got a ridigbody with 'use gravity' switched on. Does anyone have experience with physics using EasyAR?