PlayCanvas.com

I went through a tutorial from Extended Reality (XR) - Building AR | VR | MR Projects that used PlayCanvas.com to create a basic augmented reality application with a hiro and kanji marker. I adapted that tutorial to create a beneficial example for myself. I created a very basic business card with a QR code, that when scanned, takes the user to the PlayCanvas.com tutorial adaptation that I had created. The user was prompted to allow access to the device's camera. After allowing camera access, the user could then flip the buisness card over and scan one of two AR markers on the back of the business card. One of the markers shows a 3D dancing skelton and the other AR marker plays music and shows a 3D dancing robot. [2, 4, 8, 9]

This application can be personalized to with the individual's personal QR code to a PlayCanvas.com AR application where the person that possess the business card could then scan the markers on the back and the 3D images on the markers come to life and tell more information about the person on the business card, what they do, or the company that they work for.

This application was very easy to put together. I was able to easily download the assets from Sketchfab and load them into the PlayCanvas.com application and republish the changes. [2, 4, 8, 9]

Go ahead, give it a try!

Unity with Vuforia

Unity using Vuforia had a slight learning curve. I like that you can use a webcam to test your application and that there are a large number of tutorials available. There is a large community of Unity users and a great site to download assets. Video and sound can easily be added to an application. [17, 37, 41, 42]

The video link above is from a tutorial I went through with some additional sound and motion added.

Unity looks to be the superior development environment given its flexibility and adaptability to work with many SDKs, plugins, operating systems, and devices.

ARCore

I don't own an Android device, but I was unable to set up an emulator for Android after several failed attempts. I found it very difficult to use Android Studio because I had to keep installing things and couldn't multitask and do something else. The install hijacked my session. I was able to follow along with the tutorials to get a sense of what ARCore in Android Studio is capable of, but was unsuccessful at deploying it within an emulator or on an actual Android device. Unity using ARCore seems far easier to set up applications in than Android Studio. It is organized more effectively for adjustments via that different information panels instead of just straight programming and also provides a visual of the scene that is being built. The initial setup of the ARCore SDK and additional components required to build an AR application in Unity or Android Studio is lengthy since there are so many pieces. There can also be errors due to different plugins interfering with one another. [1, 7, 27, 32, 41]

ARCore does have a cool feature called meshing that makes it possible to track physical objects on a surface therefore allowing motion within the application to be tracked. There are special debugging tools (profiler) built into Chrome called DevTools that help with debugging, troubleshooting, and performance of ARCore whether the application is built in Unity or Android Studio. [1, 27, 32]