ARKit vs. ARCore vs. Vuforia vs. D'Fusion Mobile vs. Layar SDK [closed]
I've used both D'Fusion and Vuforia and here are my feedbacks
D’Fusion (Total Immersion)
D’Fusion solution is a cross-platform tool which mainly supports Web, iPhone, Android plateforms. Main features are the followings:
- It is more UI based (D’Fusion Studio & D’Fusion CV) and enable to build the whole scenario through the GUI
- Scenario intelligence is made with LUA
- Enables you to see a preview of the scenario in the D’Fusion Studio tool
- OS independant (one bundle scenario works on both Android & iPhone)
- Plug’N Play (just copy paste the updated scenario in the project)
- Compatible with Blender and Maya exports (OrgreMax)
- Supports multi-tag and Face-tracking
- Supports Unity3D
- Android (JNI) and iPhone (Lib) are already precompiled
Vuforia (Qualcomm)
Vuforia supports almost the same features and plateforms such as Android and iPhone but is more code base oriented :
- Vuforia and FastCV tools don’t have UI interfaces
- Scenario intelligence is made with JNI on Android and Obj-C/C++ (.mm) on Iphone
- It is less OS independant since both codes have to be done
- 3D objects are made through the code (vertices array in .h)
- Supports multi-tag and Face-tracking
- Supports Unity3D
- Works perfectly with NinivehGL 3D engine
- Android (JNI) and iPhone (Lib) need to be recompiled
- Tracking is more stable and shakes less than D'Fusion
I Have used both Metaio and Vuforia : in my opinion Vuforia is best option as a free of cost and good tracking. Here are some points:
Metaio
- With metaio you can develop very fast.
- Various tracking are supported e.g. marker, image targets, marker-less, 3D object tracking also.
- You have to code separately for iOS and Android.
- Paid SDK (Commercial license)
- You can play MD2 animations of about to 100 frames.
- I faced flickering in tracking.
Vuforia
- Development is sort of time consuming but once you developed an app , you cleared path.
- Tracking ImageTargets, markers, video playing, imagebuttons(this is not in Metaio).
- You have to code separately, but if you go with Unity you have to code Once.
- Now Vuforia is also come with pricing model on based of no of target scans.
- With Unity you can play Animation.
- Tracking is flicker-less.
I just used the Metaio SDK Mobile framework. The framework has great potential but has a pretty bad documentation. This highly focused to show 3D objects in front of "real tags", but for a classic AR (with bubbles indicating coordinates) quite a few things are missing. For example I had to implement my own radar because the framework offers none. I develop the iphone version of one App with this, but in the Android version I know that exist some problems with rotation and some compatibility with recent devices. The problem is that in the metaio apps all work (and also they have radar) but in the framework not appear to be the same.
I don't know the other frameworks but i recomend you to lose some time trying with a free one. You can try metaio for free and if see that it works fine for you, then buy the payed version.
Metaio also supports cross platform development using AREL in HTML5 based apps
See: https://dev.metaio.com/arel/overview/
Metaio also supports Edge Based Tracking which is very robust and does not suffer from lighting or texture condition changes.
For simple Location Based AR using GPS etc. This can be achieved without the need for any 3rd Party AR SDK.
Apple have free source code for this here:https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/samplecode/park/Introduction/Intro.html
Vuforia have a very useful feature called extended tracking which allows tracking of the environment even when the original marker is no longer in view. This is a great feature and worth investigating.
As for Layar I was not convinced