Hi, as the title suggests I’m trying to use a smartphones camera to track objects with markers and use their positions for objects in Unity. I’ve tried using AR Packages like AR Toolkit, but wasn’t successful so far. I just wanted to ask if anyone has experience with this and can help me out.
Hi,
I am currently pursuing a similar goal. My first attempt was also with the AR-Toolkit. Unfortunately, I was unable to get it to work together with the Google Cardboard/now GVR plugin. AR Toolkit on its own worked just fine and so does the GVR SDK for unity, but together the plugins conflicted. However, on reddit there is a thread that shows that smarter people than me have got it to work, so it might be worthwhile to try some more. Also, you might want to take a look at www.easyar.com which seems fairly promising, but tbh I haven’t tried it myself yet. Also, most of the documentation seems to be in Chinese.
The option that I have last looked at is Vuforia. It works absolutely brilliantly in my experience. Tracking is good, performance is good, you have a large selection of supported tracking images/objects etc. The thing is that Vuforia has its own VR mode, so you don’t even need the GVR plugin for it (though you CAN apparently use it).
The sad thing here is that you will have to shell out at least 500$ per EACH SINGLE AR APP that you want to make with Vuforia. However, to try it out for testing it is free.
For myself, I am currently slightly grudgingly experimenting with Vuforia and checking Releases · googlevr/gvr-unity-sdk · GitHub pretty much every day. There it says that in an upcoming release of Unity the cardboard camera will be integrated into unity itself so I am hoping that that will somehow make integration with free AR sdks/plugins easier.
So my reccomendation is probably: Try out Vuforia to get fast, easy, good results and see if your gameplay ideas etc work as intended. Then if you decide to go on with the project either buy a license ( 
) or invest more time/research/experimenting into getting free alternatives to work. And who knows, maybe by then, there will magically be an update on some of the plugins which make integration easier 
I hope this helped you along a bit! 
Edit: Just to give you an idea of how well Vuforia tracking works: I am using it for tracking a gun/game-controller to aim in a VR first person shooter and it works decently well, even when moving the controller fairly quickly etc. The target marker I use is approximately 20x20cm though (fairly large, I guess) and that probably improves tracking alot.