How Can I Build a Free AR Web Application with Image Tracking in Unity?

Hello Unity Community,

I’m working on a project where I need to create an Augmented Reality (AR) web application with image tracking. While I am familiar with Unity’s AR capabilities, I am specifically looking for free tools or solutions that allow me to implement AR for web browsers (e.g., WebAR).

Is it possible to integrate Unity with image tracking for web deployment using free tools? Are there any free libraries, frameworks, or plugins (like WebXR or others) that can help facilitate this process? Any advice, tutorials, or best practices for achieving this would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you so much for your help!

There are plugins you will have to install into your project. Some of them are free.

Last time I checked this is only provided by commercial applications. WebAR does not support image tracking by itself.

If you google this and find an article on “free webar image tracking” take a peek at the navigation bar (typically top bar). If you notice a menu item labelled “Pricing” you can just skip it because it will not be a free service besides a trial or severely limited (read: crippled) free version.

You may find some on Github but I urge you to check the latest commits / activity and also do a performance test if you think you could make use of it. Expect those to absolutely underperform, both speed-wise as well as recognition stability. Also, they may not work with Unity.

My advice is to absolutely not use image tracking with WebAR because the performance cost is next to prohibitive. Try to find existing solutions that use image tracking, and if it runs smoothly even on a Laptop with integrated GPU, check their HTML to see if you can find any indicators which service they use. It will likely be one of the absurdly pricey or “contact us” solutions.

Perhaps you do get lucky and things have changed in recent years but I’ve yet to see anything to the contrary. WebXR is pretty much a defunct technology, or technology sample at best (in my opinion, mileages may vary, I’m just still so heavily frustrated by its lack of progress in 10 years, it’s even worse than WebGL developments).

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