Which AR Framework is recommended?

Hello,
I am prototyping several AR project with the goal of avaluating different AR features. They should run on Android and IOS, have good documentation and examples and a high feature count.

Therefore I have to choose between ARCore, ARFoundation and Vuforia. Is there somewhere a comparison between them? As far as I know, ARFoundation is the recommended framework to work with in Unity but the documentation is not very detailed (and was not updated recently)

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.xr.arfoundation@1.0/manual/index.html#technical-details

I also do not understand why you should prefer ARFoundation before ARCore since ARCore also runs on IOS.

Any help is highly appreciated.

 

ARFoundation is high-level abstract framework supported by Unity, that allow you to build AR solution for both, I am not sure if ARCore will cover all ARKit features, but ARFoundation will - you should stick with it, but stay away from Vuforia, it is not a good choice anymore.

 

haha,what is wrong with Vuforia,nobody like it.

 

I used Vuforia and Metaio since 2011, also Strings (iOS) - at that time, it was being developed by Qualcomm so that their processors could benefit from a library of AR that had been optimized for their processors. since then, Metaio was Bought by Apple (2015), Vuforia didnt even had a name at that time - was bought by PTC, strings disappeared, and later both Apple and Google released their free version of AR framework: ARKit (60fps - great) and ARCore (30fps only). Then Vuforia become impracticable, since it ever was too expensive and require you to upload your trackables on their site prior to develop an AR application (that only works online, as I can remember). Vuforia still try to push you to PAY them for their AR solution, and both ARKit + ARCore are free to used, supported by Apple and Google!!!!

 

So ARFoundation is the way to go? I really like the object recognition by vuforia afaik this is not possible with ARFoundation out of the box right?

 

Currently, ARFoundation supports Object recognition via ARKit for iOS. If you are building for iOS only, you don't need Vuphobia

 

Damn. I am building for Android (and maybe later for IOS). But I think I will start with ARFoundation and maybe I have to switch later.

Tbh this is really confusing... why should I use ARFoundation when I want only support IOS? What is the benefit of using it when I could also use the ARKit plugin.

 

"Unity ARKit plugin" was depreciated, you should only access iOS through ARFoundation moving forward.