Location Based AR without 8th-Wall

Help & Support
#1

I’ve recently stumbled across the GeoAR.js implementation for AR.js:

As this looks very promising I was wondering If it would be possible to integrate a similar feature in Playcanvas. I assume they use the GPS coordination to calculate an 3d-Offset to the world origin, also updating the Camera Rotation based on Device Rotation. Would that be a starting point for such an implementation or might there be some additional tricks they use to get it to work?

I was also wondering if anyone knows about any WebXR Roadmap which might integrate this functionality in the future.

Als always, thanks for any heads up!

#2

Hmm, I’m not sure if it’s also handling the AR part of the feature or just using GPS and sensors to work out where it is :thinking: If it’s the latter, it should be okay to integrate but if it’s also doing AR logic (which it might be with AR.js), then it’s a lot harder as someone would have to port an implementation for the PlayCanvas renderer.

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#3

Thanks for your reply. I’m not sure if I understand you correctly.
Doesn’t the GPS and sensors build the AR logic there (a rudimentary SLAM implementation), wich is usually done by Marker or Image tracking for AR.js?
I actually thought about trying to reimplement this part and us it as a transformation source for a transparent PC Scene, similar to the Playcanvas’ jsartoolkit based Marker AR.
Actually it could also provide an initial offset for an WebXR scene, but I don’t think that ar.js currently uses this workflow (probably due to the small WebXR support)
But maybe I’m on the wrong track here …

#4

Btw: Here is a demo of their gps based AR.js implementation, It’s quite quirky :

#5

AR.js is tied directly to three.js IIRC and you can’t take the ‘data’ part of AR.js that renders objects etc.

It should be possible to separate/have a PlayCanvas port, just that no one has done that publicly yet

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#6

Ok I’ve started a project to see how far I may come:
https://playcanvas.com/project/824585

It currently reads out your gps position, offsets it to a defined world position and calculates the offset for the world. I’m not sure If I may have to mirror one or both axis, but maybe that could be a start for further investigating such tracking. I will next integrate the device rotation and camera view to evaluate how far such a quick and dirty solution could work out.

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#7

Ok, I’ve added the device rotation and the camera view (based on the marker ar code).
To test set the lat/lang parameters at the cubes “arObject” component. Currently the rotation (based on gyro) seems to be of and I’m not sure if the calculations are correct. Any help appreciated.

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