Hey, we are currently trying to create a webcam AR app for windows and are considering Unity MARS. We already are subscribed but after some builds we noticed that there there is not input for webcam footage. How would you achieve having AR capabilities with a webcam and footage output via Unity on Windows?
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards,
Jan
Hey there! Thanks for reaching out and sorry to hear you’re having trouble.
Unfortunately, this is not possible with Unity MARS out of the box. Unity MARS itself doesn’t implement AR functionality, but wraps the functionality of the platform it’s running on. In the Editor, we use simulated environments and face video to simulate AR capabilities, but using a webcam to provide AR data requires a third-party provider. Some of our early in-editor demos with live face tracking used a Unity MARS wrapper around the ULSee Face Tracking provider, but that product has since been discontinued.
If you have software that can provide AR data based on a webcam feed, it may be relatively straightforward to wrap it in a Unity MARS data provider. I recommend that you check out the Sample Face Tracking Provider in com.unity.mars package samples (go to Package Manager, select Unity MARS, and go to the Samples tab). It is a basic implementation that creates a “smilie face” of fake tracking points that rotate around. You would replace the fake tracking points with data from a face tracking solution in practice.
Check out the documentation around writing new provdiers to learn more. Good luck!