What’s New in AR Foundation 6.0
Version 6.0 of AR Foundation is here and comes with several changes and new features. AR Foundation 6.0 requires Unity 6 Preview or newer.
Highlight of New Features
- Support for Render Graph allows you to minimize your number render passes, and the memory and bandwidth used by each render pass
- With Persistent Anchors you can save anchors during a session and reload them during a subsequent session
- The new Bounding Boxes feature allows you to detect and track 3D bounding boxes around real world objects in a physical environment
- Image Stabilization helps stabilize shaky video from the camera on ARCore
- Occlusion is now supported in XR Simulation so you can test occlusion without deploying to device. Note: there is a known issue that can cause simulated occlusion to stop working when using Render Graph on Apple silicon builds
- You can build AssetBundles containing XRReferenceImageLibrary objects with a new window located at Assets > AR Foundation > Build AssetBundles
- Create anchors asynchronously and leverage the new Awaitable class introduced in Unity 6
- Added support for planes to have multiple semantic labels via the PlaneClassifications flags enum, ARPlane.classifications, and BoundedPlane.classifications
Highlight of Changes
- Upgraded minimum Unity editor version from 2021.2 to 6000.0. Refer to the official Unity 6 New Naming Convention announcement for more information.
- ARMeshManager now recalculates normals on a mesh if normals were requested and the provider did not calculate them
- The SimulatedTrackedImage component now renders a textured mesh of its image, allowing you to see the image in the Scene view and Game view without requiring additional GameObjects
- XR Simulation navigation controls are now bound to configurable Input Actions instead of hard-coded to WASD keys. You can configure these Input Actions in the XR Simulation Preferences window
For a full list of features, changes and fixes, see AR Foundation’s What’s new page or the AR Foundation changelog.
Requirements
- AR Foundation 6.0 requires Unity 6 Preview or newer
Samples
For pre-configured sample scenes that demonstrate how to use each feature, refer to the AR Foundation Samples GitHub repository.
4 Likes
Some great news!
Any ETA for Vulkan support? I still want to use realtime meshing with VFX graph!
1 Like
What about Image Stabilization for ARKit?
We are still in progress on Vulkan support. No ETA to share yet, this is ongoing work with Unity’s Graphics team.
1 Like
ARKit does not have an Image Stabilization API. If Apple releases such an API in the future, we can consider integrating it then.
1 Like
Is it possible to save persistent anchors in the cloud and use on different devices, e.g. save an anchor on Apple Vision Pro and load it on Quest 3?
1 Like
Thanks for the clear breakdown, KevinXR! The image stabilization for ARCore sounds like a game-changer for smoother experiences. Definitely checking out the samples on GitHub. Also, I’m curious to dive deeper into the topic of how to start working from home, as it’s something I’ve been considering lately. 
No. AR Foundation is a cross-platform wrapper of AR functionality, but does not implement AR functionality itself. No AR platform support cross-platform saving and loading of anchors.
1 Like
I saw in a preview that AR Foundation for Quest 3 will also introduce some AR meshing algorithm. Does this mean we will see meshing on Android too?
1 Like
No. AR Foundation does not implement AR functionality on any platform – it is a cross-platform wrapper built on top of third-party AR capabilities. Meta supports meshing on their platform, therefore AR Foundation Meshing works on Quest. Google does not support meshing on ARCore, therefore AR Foundation cannot support Meshing on ARCore until Google implements this capability.
2 Likes
Hi Toby, I work on Lightship ARDK at Niantic, If you need Android meshing support today you, can leverage our SDK. Meshing is supported on all devices at greater range. We worked closely with the team at Unity to ensure our SDK extends ARFoundation with little to no extra work from the user. It’s just a upm to add and enable. Here is a video showing Meshing in editor - 3.6 Video
1 Like
Hi mate, yes I’m already using Lightship, but thanks a lot for your suggestion 
ARDK is really great
Can vision OS user persistent anchors ？
1 Like
HI ！ Is it only Meta Open XR that can use Persistent Anchors？Other platforms do not support saving anchor IDs。
Currently yes, Meta OpenXR is the only provider that implements persistent anchors. Our team is working on an ARCore implementation of this API right now, which will release in a future version of AR Foundation. If you have a specific platform request, please drop us a note on our road map: XR roadmap | Unity.
