During the graduate program at my university in computer science, I started getting interested in mobile app development. For a research project in collaboration with the government of Thailand, I was able to use Flutter 1.0 for the first time in a larger project. For the last 2.5 years, I am working as a Senior Flutter Engineer/Tech Lead for a mobile application agency located in Bremen, Germany, where most of our projects use Flutter.
Florian Vögtle
neusta mobile solutions GmbH, tech lead/software engineer
FluttAR – Implementing Augmented Reality in Flutter using Unity’s AR Foundation Framework
Augmented Reality describes the process of integrating information and visuals into reality, e.g., the placement of virtual 3D objects into a user’s environment. Smartphones through their available cameras and sensors, e.g., LiDAR and gyroscope, are the perfect foundation for implementing Augmented Reality. On iOS Apple provides ARKit (https://developer.apple.com/augmented-reality/arkit/) and on Android Google provides ARCore (https://developers.google.com/ar). With Flutter and cross-platform development in general, this required individual development for each platform and writing native code, through which the benefit of Flutter, i.e., one code base for all platforms, is lost. As a result the complexity and required time of the development increases. Instead of using ARKit and ARCore directly within Flutter, Unity’s AR Foundation framework may be used instead. AR Foundation (https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.xr.arfoundation@5.0/manual/index.html) is a wrapper around ARKit and ARCore for implementing AR features in Android and iOS using a single code base.
This talk will build up on top of the AR Foundation framework and consists of two parts. In the first part, an introduction to AR Foundation is given, including the following main topics:
- How to get started using AR Foundation?
- What features are available within AR Foundation?
The second part will cover the integration of AR Foundation with Unity into a Flutter app, including the following main topics:
- How can Unity/AR Foundation be integrated within Flutter?
- How can data be transferred between Flutter and Unity?
- How can the Unity build process be integrated within the development/continuous integration process?