IOS AR Apps with Unreal 5 - Current implementations not working ?

Development Platform & Builds XR Development
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Hi All, I’d be very curious to know if/how building production IOS AR app is possible at this point :

I am in the process of building IOS AR apps based on the AR template (BP) that comes with the engine.
Turns out that this capability has numerous issues :

  1. in 5.3 and 5.4 the AR tracking is really bad, positioned objects are not stable in space when the camera (user ) is moving. This is a known issue that is confirmed with my tests.
    https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/ue5-3-ar-actor-location-not-positioning-correctly-ios/1326768/5

  2. On 5.2 and 5.1 AR works fine, but only in development mode – AR is broken (black screen) with apps in distribution mode
    https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/ios-ar-app-shows-black-background-rather-than-a-camera-overlay-in-production/547275/69
    There are patches (ARKit plugins fixed ) but they don’t work for me even after following all the hoops described in the forum thread.

So I’m puzzled here, how are we supposed to build AR apps ???
Thank you

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It is certainly a black art at this point in time.

For 5.4
Epic finally has admitted that there is a bug and it’s logged in their Issue Tracker

They say it’ll be fixed in 5.4.3. The best bet is to wait for that… but then again Epic has been known to miss those Target Fix builds and have the fix slip to the next build, or the next…

For 5.2
The good news is that you can ship with 5.2 today. However, to do so you need to fix 2 things.

and

Epic, doesn’t really give AR or iOS much attention. and AR on iOS is right in the middle of the Venn diagram of things they don’t seem to care about. But oddly they are building Vision Pro support… so I really don’t get what they are up to over there.

-e

-e

1 Like
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Hello Eric,
Thanks for the confirmation and feedback. Just wanted to mention that I actually tried the 5.2 fix here iOS AR app shows black background rather than a camera overlay in production - #71 by SOLEDADDIAZ
But couldn’t make it wok for me. Even after rebuilding the fixed plugin using a separate C++ project (as described in the post) and injecting them in my 5.2 BP project the error message was still there. Haven’t tried in 5.1 because it only takes xcode <= 14 that can no longer be installed on my mac.
Anyway thanks again, hope Epic’s fix will actually come.
Cheers
G

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FYI,
Epic now says that the tracking bug should be fixed in 5.4.3. In theory once that ships all the bugs will be fixed and you should be able to build and ship ARkit AR apps again… ( i have no idea what’s happening with Android…)

Boy, it’s been a long road… there hasn’t be an official Unreal release since 4.27 in which you could ship an Arkit AR app that actually works…

-e