How I’m Learning ARKit | Hacker News Reader

How I’m Learning ARKit

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57 pointsgmcerveny19 comments

I've been doing mobile AR since 2011 and it seems like there is probably demand for some AR app best practices now that ARKit and FB Studio are coming out. Is that accurate?

If so I'll take the time to write up something if people are interested.

Yes! I work on building AR applications and I would find any best practice you have very helpful!

The ARKit example app has a readme doc that lists best practices when developing ARKit experiences. I feel that list is super valuable when building ARKit apps in general.

I would love to hear your best practices on developing AR apps!

This post is a list of links you'll find on the natural Google searches. That's fine as a gateway drug, but you'll get more mileage out of frequenting one of the AR/VR subreddits or chats.

For things in the early stages, plugging yourself into the community is more valuable than consuming the right news or tutorials.

Sounds like good advice.

What are some of the AR/VR subreddits or chats you like?

After scanning some of the more promising subreddits, I made a few notes:

/r/augmentedreality

  - 6K Subscribers
  - Demos of things people have built
  - Promising

/r/virtualreality

  - 39K Subscribers
  - Mix of gaming news and "see what I built" articles

/r/vr_ar_ux_design

  - 220 Subscribers
  - Very UX article heavy

/r/AR_Innovations

  - 1K Subscribers
  - Mix of consumer news and development resources about AR

/r/virtuality

  - 1K Subscribers
  - Mostly hype about VR, few development resources

/r/Vive

  - 77K Subscribers
  - Mostly about gaming, not development

Would people be interested in a subreddit where we can talk about ARKit stuff? It would be great to share projects and ideas of other developers building stuff with ARKit!

I made a sample code to place a 3D sphere with ARkit. it differs from the official demo by detecting not only horizontal surfaces, but also feature points (for example, vertical walls). But so far I wasn't able to achieve the same kind of accuracy as shown by the ruler video and few other demos.

The ARKit api is very simple, I don't know what else I can do to improve the accuracy.

You should look at the ARKit Example app, I think they do some averaging of the feature points you get to better stabilize anchoring in real world.

Also note that since ARKit identifies points from image features, stickiness will be improved with areas that have a lot of texture, like a wood table.

I’ve been experienmenting with ARKit to see where it works and where it fails, it does terrible if you use it in a car. Try it! That’s shows that Apple relies so much on the motion data on the phone.

Message if me if anyone has any questions or interests in ARkit, love to chat :).

Thank you! is the placeobjects code on this page https://developer.apple.com/arkit/ , the ARkit example app you mentioned? I have been learning this code. I will double check.

Ya the example app. They have some really nice tips on User experience, but the code is dense. I need a few days to sit down and read through it.

Started a ARKit project, I am trying to accurately place a shape based on user touch. Is this possible without vertical plane detection ? I am new to Swift, but have been picking it up quickly.

I've been playing with ARKit quite a bit recently and enjoying it. There's a plugin available for Unity now that integrates with ARKit which makes converting models convenient.

Do people have strong opinions on building ARKit apps with XCode vs using a Unity plugin? Does it matter if I'm coming mostly from a JavaScript / web dev background?

Not sure what you are asking because XCode is an IDE and Unity is a 3D engine. You would be using both on an iOS project. You'd export your unity project to an XCode project then publish the .ipa from XCode.

Are you wondering if it's better to use OpenGL/Metal instead of Unity? I'd say stick with Unity unless you've written a shader before. You're not going to build an optimized 3D/AR app without quite a bit of experience.

Well the Example ARKit app is based off of scenekit, which is a wrapper for Metal. Scenekit is a more natural choice to people who have background with Three.js or want to develop more with code.

Ive been developing ARKit stuff solely with scenekit, and I enjoy it. I would like to learn unity, but I dont see a point now cause of the high learning curve to learn unity and since ARKit is iOS only, no point in using something thats cross platform. But would love to hear of any feedback on using Scenekit vs Unity!

Ive been using Xcode so far instead of unity, but only cause I have more experience with Scenekit and Xcode rather than unity. If you have experience using three.js, then xcode should be fun.

The only thing is finding good resources to learn scenekit. Ping me if you are interested and I can send you some links that helped me learn Scenekit!

ARKit looks cool, even though I am as far as one can be from the iStuff.

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