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Me and a friend are trying to develop an app with a very unique and strange concept. I have a rubiks cube, where all the stickers have been replaced with QR Codes, So that to the naked eye, they are impossible to distinguish from each other, but through a QR-Code reader (and a fair bit of patience) you can scan one and one sticker to reveal which color it in fact is, and use this system to ultimately solve the rubiks cube. The idea was widely received in the cubing community, and I am now looking to expand on that idea by making an app that recognizes each sticker, tracks them using a tracking plugin, and virtually colors in that sticker, so that through the lens of my smartphone, the stickers have colors. I have so far made a simple version of the app, using the Vuforia tracking plugin, and it's produced really promising results Screenshot from said app

My problem though, is that Vuforia only allows 2-3 stickers to be tracked and painted at a time, and while I've had it read 6 stickers before, that requiered me to hold the cube very still. I am developing a brand new set of stickers that isn't QR Codes, but rather random patterns that hopefully will be easier for the app to recognize, but what I really need is a tracking plugin that allows more stickers to be tracked at once. Vuforia is, to my understanding, the best free tracking plugin out there, but are there any other tracking plugins that can produce the results I'm seeking? Optimally, I would like to track 27 stickers at once, as that's the maximum amount of stickers visible on a rubiks cube at a time. but if that's too much, 9 stickers, which is the amount of stickers for each side, would do just fine too. Can anyone with more knowledge to tracking and extended tracking help me? I didn't make this app, only the stickers, cube and concept, so I don't know how to use the plugins. Would it be possible to use several plugins at once? I am willing to pay for the license for a better plugin if that's what it takes. If there are any better ways to approach my idea, I am also very open to hear them. Thank you very much for your time

user7492770
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  • You're bumping up against the limits of the Vuforia plugin. Vuforia only claims to track up to 5 image targets at once, so I'm not sure how you got 6. In any case, it is unlikely that you will be able to get the desired results. – Draco18s no longer trusts SE Jul 10 '17 at 13:58
  • Oh alright, thanks. But what other trackers are there? Other than vuforia? – user7492770 Jul 10 '17 at 17:03
  • I looked into alternatives a couple years back when Vuforia changed their licensing scheme from "$40 one-time device-recog only" to "milk our current users for money" (I mean, uh, "$100 a month cloud-recog only"). The *best* alternative I found was some other proprietary plugin that wanted a $5000 up-front one-time payment in order to use it. Suffice to say I don't remember the name of it because that wasn't happening. – Draco18s no longer trusts SE Jul 10 '17 at 18:23
  • Wow, got it. That's a bit out of my price range.. So you believe I won't be able to track more than 5-6 stickers tops? You clearly know a lot about tracking, so would you happen to know what type of pattern would be most recognizable and distinguishable for the app? I've sent in samples of QR codes, dots, circles, waves, barcodes, colour-mashes, omnichromatic, squares and lines in hopes of finding the most efficient pattern, but that's gonna take some time to sample through. I'm trying to avert from using colours, as they are too easily recognizable by the human eye. Thank you very much – user7492770 Jul 10 '17 at 19:47
  • Yeah, its kind of pricey. Fortunately Vuforia got a lot of pushback about that decision and made a "device only" recog an option again. As for target patterns: https://library.vuforia.com/articles/Solution/Optimizing-Target-Detection-and-Tracking-Stability The TLDR being "high contrast, hard corners, lots of them." Which is why 2D QR codes work so well. – Draco18s no longer trusts SE Jul 10 '17 at 20:09

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