I’m new to the world of XR development. My objective is to create a simple prototype demo of an AR application that involves full-body mocap. I want the viewer to be able to move around to see the mocap avatar from all sides. I’ve looked at some of the “getting started” training videos, but still have some questions I need to resolve before I go further.
The big one I have at the moment is: Do I have to pick a target platform (Hive, Oculus, iOS, Gear, etc.) now, or can my demo run on multiple platforms? And, if I do have to pick a platform, how do I develop for that one?
I do mostly VR at work but we’ve been branching out into more AR development with UE4 and I can share some notes. For one, UE4’s AR libraries are quite out of date and to a certain degree, poorly optimized. I recommend your first move is to package the template out-of-the-box for Android and iOS and test both on a range of devices, if youre lucky enough to have that kind of testing capability. This will give you a sort of baseline to work with.
Deploying an AR project on a tablet or phone is different to deploying a project for Quest/Quest 2, and its worth mentioning here that you cant use a VR HMD to test and use AR projects, not even Quest/Quest 2. In short, an AR project will only work on AR capable hardware, a VR project will only work on VR hardware, etc.
What I would do in your position is (besides what I mentioned above) just develop your way. Make your project the way you want to make it and then try to package it for as many different devices as possible once its ready. Some plugins wont work with your project, so be careful which ones you use and package frequently as you go.
