This is part of a 30 day sprint where we try to publish 30 projects in 30 days, this means building full projects from scratch. Double checking the code, writing the tutorial and then posting it . If there are any typos do let us know and I hope you enjoy this tutorial and project.

Introduction

Interested in AR but not sure where to start? 

With the introduction of ARKit by Apple and ARCore by Google, AR was bought to millions of consumers and their iDevices and Android phones. There are now a few options for developers to choose and start from when building or planning for an AR Application. In this article, I’ll go over the alternative Vuforia. And compare it with ARKit and ARCore that will help you narrow down your choice based on your requirement.

Although ARKit supports millions of devices from iPhone 6s and above. ARCore is a different story, where the support is limited to the mid-high end devices. This not a fault of their own comes down to the fact that a majority of Android devices out there have mediocre specs in terms of processing.

Vuforia

That’s where Vuforia steps in. Vuforia is an AR SDK that can identify and track images and 3D objects. It uses marker-based tracking which uses far less computational power compared to marker-less. Some use cases and applications just might need something lightweight which vuforia offers.

The device support for Vuforia is huge. Basically any  Android 5.1+, iOS 11+ and even Windows. It becomes very easy to build cross-platform apps, especially with such a huge device support list. You can also build desktop AR Apps with vuforia using a webcam.

It has very strong Image and 3D model recognition and tracking. Since the engine is trained to recognize 2D Images and 3D Models beforehand, it is very fast and takes fewer resources. There are multiple ways to implement the trained models. We have an article just for that. If you want to get started with Vuforia here.

Vuforia also has something called fusion, which will leverage ARKit/ARCore if the device supports it, else it will fall back to its own tech. It’s well funded, has good documentation and is also built right into unity.

The only downside is that unless you have a paid license, you get a vuforia watermark in the app.

Vuforia vs ARKit/ARCore

ARkit and ARcore are both marker-less AR technologies, meaning it doesn’t need any prior knowledge of users’ environment to overlay any content into the real world. It’s sophisticated, offers excellent tracking and AR experience and is definitely the future of AR.

They can also perform marker-based operations such as Image detection, but it’s a part of the entire SDK. You’ll need a compatible device. 

When these sets of complex features are not needed, Vuforia is the way to go, as that decouples the app from being deployed only to their respective platforms and supported devices.

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