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A-Frame's immersive-ar functionality will work on some Android devices I've tested with, but I haven't had success with iOS.

It is possible to use an A-Frame scene for markerless AR on iOS using a commercial external library. Example: this demo from Zapworks using their A-Frame SDK. https://zappar-xr.github.io/aframe-example-instant-tracking-3d-model/

The tracking seems to be no where near as good as A-Frame's hit test demo (https://github.com/stspanho/aframe-hit-test), but it does seem to work on virtually any device and browser I've tried, and it is good enough for the intended purpose.

I would be more than happy to fallback to lower quality AR mode in order to have AR at all in devices that don't support immersive-ar in browser. I have not been able to find an A-Frame compatible solution for using only free/open source components for doing this, only commercial products like Zapworks and 8th Wall.

Is there a free / open source plugin for A-Frame that allows a scene to be rendered with markerless AR across a very broad range of devices, similar to Zapworks?

earok
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  • It seems that WebXR support for iOS Safari is on the way anyway - https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/653984 - which would make this question largely irrelevant, but I don't know when Apple intend to release this. – earok Jul 15 '21 at 23:42

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I ended up rolling my own solution which wasn't complete, but good enough for the project. Strictly speaking, there's three problems to overcome with getting a markerless AR experience on mobile without relying on WebXR:

  • Webcam display
  • Orientation
  • Position

Webcam display is fairly trivial to implement in HTML5 without any libraries.

Orientation is already handled nicely by A-FRAME's "magic window" functionality, including on iOS.

Position was tricky and I wasn't able to solve it. I attempted to use the FULLTILT library's accelerometer functions, and even using the readings with gravity filtered out I wasn't able to get a high enough level of accuracy. (It happened that this particular project did not need it)

earok
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