When we originally began working on Mantaray AR: Unlimited, we discussed whether we were going to write the image detection and tracking software in-house, or whether we would look for a cheap solution. After about 1 minute of thinking it over, we decided that it would be a waste of time to develop the Augmented Realty software ourselves. We ended up looking into a lot of different solutions, but the one we found that fit best was: Vuforia by Qualcomm.
The pros to Vuforia were the following:
- They took care of image feature detection for us.
- They took care of orienting the scene to the image.
- It had a plugin version that would integrate with Unity.
Our team had used Unity before, so it was an obvious choice once we found Vuforia!