AR Foundation is pretty neat. It seems most AR/MR platforms are reinventing the wheel—so Unity has a nice abstraction layer for most of it. No hand tracking, though.
@flarb that always felt like the biggest problem to me; too slow on basic features, and couldn't polyfill. (Same problem when their vr then xr abstraction turned up... it was way behind sdks and only covered say, one headset instead of the 5 we needed).
Unity needs to allow users to implement low level implementations to work with their abstraction
@flarb yeah, which is why people should be able to make their own polyfill for features, how they want it for their app. Meanwhile the game side uses the clean api still!
Instead the messy hacky extra abstraction intertwines with game code (which should only live on top of the abstraction)
@Soylentgraham I'm using the Snapdragon Spaces implementation, and they basically use AR Foundation but then provide their own APIs for missing features--such as hand tracking. But I'm assuming it would be possible to access platform-specific features in plane tracking etc. since I guess the vendor implements ARFoundation classes themselves?
@flarb hmm i assume unity implements the abstraction, otherwise we could all make our own vendoring? (Hence why it falls behind :)
@Soylentgraham You might be right--but I could have sworn from reading the Snapdragon docs, Qualcomm says they implement the low level details of the interfaces themselves? I think you can actually open the ARFoundation classes and see Qualcomm's own code in them.
@flarb it should be in a package! :)
@Soylentgraham the Snapdragon Spaces SDK is!
@flarb hmmm! Im gonna have to see if it really is underneath ARFoundation then, will be pleased if we can start using unity's abstractions
@flarb we shouldn't need ar foundation for low level stuff anyway right? Really all vendor implementations and features should be coming from openxr. (Not that I ever really had a nice way to write my own device-emulator there either)
My view is, I should be able to use whatever abstraction to write my own implementation for the DK1, if i cant, there's something wrong with the abstraction :)
@Soylentgraham I think now there are enough platforms trying to do the same thing (Meta Presence Platform, Snapdragon Spaces, Magic Leap, HoloLens, etc.) that there may be some movement on this. The tricky part will probably be how each platform does the equivalent of Microsoft's old Scene Understanding API--I can't see a one size fits all approach for all hardware on that one.