Table of Contents

Fundamentals of AR-driven Unity applications

EasyAR Sense Unity Plugin provides the fundamental features for developing AR applications in Unity. This article introduces the basic knowledge and components you need to understand when developing AR applications in Unity.

Before you begin

Unity AR application development fundamentals

First, you need to learn which Unity versions and platforms EasyAR is compatible with:

In Unity, the typical process of an AR application is similar to general AR applications, but camera data acquisition, tracker operation, and virtual content rendering are managed through the AR Session component.

flowchart TD
  subgraph AR
    CameraDevice[Camera Device]
    Tracker[Tracker]
    Renderer[Renderer]

    CameraDevice -->|Image Frame| Tracker
    Tracker -->|Image Frame + Tracked Pose| Renderer
  end
  
  subgraph unity["Unity AR"]
    B[Session]
    C([Camera])
    O([Origin])
    T([Target])
    B -- transform --> C
    B -- transform --> O
    B -- transform --> T
    
    classDef Unity fill:#6e6ce6,stroke:#333,color:#fff
    class B Unity
    class C Unity
    class O Unity
    class T Unity
  end
  
  CameraDevice -..- B
  Tracker -..- B
  Renderer -..- C
  Renderer -..- O
  Renderer -..- T

You will start from the following fundamental components and gradually learn the basics of AR applications in Unity:

Then, you need to understand center mode, which is a key concept for understanding how EasyAR controls the behavior of Unity components:

If you have experience with Unity XR frameworks, such as AR Foundation, you may want to learn how to use these features when developing EasyAR applications:

If you have completed AR development in the Unity editor, you may want to learn how to configure your Unity project before packaging and publishing so that it can run on target devices:

Combined with the fundamental knowledge above, you can refer to the following workflow example to practice what you have learned:

Next steps

After mastering the fundamentals of Unity AR application development, you still need to learn more features and components required for AR development:

If you need to run EasyAR applications on headset devices, you also need to: