We would like to inform our community about the deprecation of Unity MARS and the Unity AR Companion app.
Starting with Unity 6.1, Unity MARS is considered deprecated, and no additional features will be developed.
We will continue to address critical bugs for Unity 6.1. However, Unity MARS is no longer recommended for production use.
The Unity MARS subscription entitlement check has been removed in the latest package versions (com.unity.mars 1.6 & 2.0), enabling existing users to continue their productions without requiring entitlement validation on Unity 2022 LTS and Unity 6.1.
What does this mean for you?
Deprecation means that while Unity MARS functionality will remain available in Unity 6.1, we discourage its use for future projects as development focus shifts away from it. For users who are continuing to build compelling mixed reality experiences, we encourage you to explore and transition to the AR Foundation package, which provides tools for augmented and mixed reality development.
For further details or any questions, feel free to engage with us here or submit a support request. Thank you for being part of the Unity community.
But i’m sure still will bring much needed (although small) price decrease into Unity Industry license! (since the industry license was sold with MARS package included as one of the features)
I wish we would have had MARS between 2015 to 2020 while I was involved in various AR apps including museum tours and predictive maintenance and so forth. It seemed like a great product solving hard problems but ultimately for me at least, the timing was off.
And honestly, I’m so glad not having to deal with AR anymore. AR never feels quite right, and often regarded merely as a “gimmick” in consumer products. It seems to work best IMO for industrial/entertainment applications but the frequent misalignments and complete loss of tracking makes it an inherently “unstable” technology.
And I mean that mainly in terms of how the tech is perceived: what customers expect how AR works (how Apple/Google product marketing sells it) and what their ROI will be vs the reality of what AR is actually able to achieve in real-world environments across devices, environments and lighting, and how it is perceived by users/staff.
It may have been useful for my work, but I didn’t need it enough to pay for it, so I never gave it a spin - well lucky me.
I see this as another sign of Unity turning further away from becoming a universal tool for interactive graphics. And since I don’t make games or gambling apps, this makes me turn further away.
Following our deprecation of MARS in Unity 6.1, we’re writing to let you know that Unity MARS and the Unity AR Companion app will no longer be supported for production starting from Unity 6.3. For more information on your accessing and deleting your information, please refer to the Supplemental Privacy Statement for MARS.
