Prime31 Studios will be releasing a free plugin in the Unity Asset store in the coming days. It will be the Native Pause and UI Plugin and will consist of an easy to use package that will give you the ability to create menus easily along with a really easy to use pause menu that essentially freezes the entire Unity Mono VM.
We have finally released our most requested plugin of all time: the Augmented Reality Plugin! It took a LOT of trial and error to find a solution that was performant enough for us to consider releasing it. That day has finally come!
Here and here are a couple demo videos showing the plugin in action on an iPhone 4. As you can see by the FPS counter, it is blazing fast! It also couldn’t be much easier to use. The plugin will give you a Texture2D that you are free to set on as many renderer’s as you want. The Texture2D will be updated automatically every frame with the output from the camera.
With the AR plugin, is there any included marker or target reading capability? Please expand a bit more on what is included and what we have to roll on our own.
I’d suggest, by looking at the two example videos and reading the description, that no marker reading capability is included - but getting the live camera view into unity without too much lag is a big step in the right direction! - well done Prime31.
@TheLorax, there is no marker or edge detection built in. There is a single hook point though where you can plug in any type of detection you would like from any of the open source (or closed source) projects out there.
Quick update: the upcoming version of the plugin has some nice performance improvements. The performance test had to be redone with more goodies on screen. Check out a video here.
Any tips on what source to use and how to do this? We’re considering buying the AR plugin, but have to make sure that we can actually achieve what we want with it
first off, not to be annoying or anything, but I fail to see why it’s called an Augmented Reality plugin,…
Basicly, if I’m getting this right, and please tell me if I’m not…
at this moment the plugin does not embed any AR related processing,
but is more like an iphone live camera feed plugin, right?
Of course, I know, once the feed is in, we can use it just to display the feed or do any processing we want, but still.
Anyway, pretty interesting functionality either way,
might come in handy for a project I have coming up
Is there a way to capture a higher resolution image from the iphone camera at specific moments in time?
like at the press of a button, or hardcoded in time?
Or is the access really limited to low resolution imaging?
@EnoJoy, the current access is a stream from the camera. You can turn it on/off at will. The plugin seems to fit the definition of augmented reality as defined by Wikipedia:
We provide the live feed and your game provides the sound/graphics/input.
@Kaya, all of our plugins are currently iOS only right now. We will most certainly be expanding to other platforms in the future but there is no date set yet for when we do.
So to get it right, its really just a Live Camera Streaming then, not an AR plugin, as even the Wikipedia entry you cite explicitely mentions the relationship of view in combination with “computer generated sensory input”.
Unpleasant thing to find out. Considered getting it for experimentation and prototyping but $75 as introduction price, a price beyond the GK plugin, is definitely outside of what I consider paying for a mere live video streaming plugin that lacks any AR functionality even basic one.
But thanks for the clarification on what it is, was not clear from the vids on the website
sounds like you use more ram than you have at hand (non iphone4 is a max of 70-80mb of usage, iphone4 has 2-4 times that much at hand to use). look into the log xcode provides you in the organizer if it mentions something about memory warning. Generally without knowing the error its hard to help you
