Hi I’m currently doing research regarding XR capacities and unreal, ive found that what is possible on unity is quite advanced, straightforward and impressive:
Ive been able to replicate some of these features within unity during testing using geospatial creator to get a base understanding of what’s possible.
However I haven’t been able to find an unreal equivalent…
It looks as though Geospatial Creator isn’t available on unreal, is this correct?
Is there any viable workaround for this, otherwise is there anything in the works to bring these tools over to unreal engine?
As you’d know theres so much power and scope behind what unreal can do, particularly with a lot of its other plugins: so it would be amazing to be able to utilise Geospatial creator with unreal. Unfortunately using the unity engine presents some limitations which predicates its utilisation for our use case.
Hi there @janine ive begun making progress again and am currently exploring the ar capacities of cesium, XR and Unreal.
Can you link to any guides or resources on how to do this with unreal?
This is the current status with the AR Core devs at google
So it sounds as though its possible, but I wasn’t able to find any examples he was referring to.
I then got in touch with an experienced developer on the Unreal team with some background with related tech in unreal.
He told me
"That said, I checked with our team, and they told me that UE is currently built with ArCode 1.37 which does have geospatial APIs, but we have not exposed them in the engine. Developers would have to expose these features themselves.
But it might not be as complicated as it seems. (once again, I never tried this API, and know little about it).
For displaying the world content, Cesium combined with Google Photorealistic tiles can do it.
And for converting any geospatial location to UE frame, you can also use the Georeferencing plugin.
As long as you have correctly defined your world origin, the ArEarth_getCameraGeospatialPose seems to be returning the camera location. You can convert it to Geospatial coordinates, and with the help of the tangent frame at camera location, convert the camera angles to an UE transform.
Then, any object you want to place in the UE world can also be located in the real world with the same process."
Im trying to get my head around getting this working at the moment, but have been having some trouble!
He followed up later and told me that Google has just made the Geospatial Creator API public on GitHub, so now UE licensees can implement support for it in UE
Opensourced reference
If the api could be used alongside cesium to achieve what can be done with unity in a much more straightforward way, then it could be excellent to be able to utilise this and perhaps have some examples within the project. To try to get parity with unity capabilities. Even some examples within the unreal cesium stock plugin in a future update would be incredibly helpful for ar!
If you can let me know your thoughts, that would be fantastic. Thanks
Hi @Kevin_Ring and @azrogers, I hope you’re ok if I also ask you both. You’ve been a huge help in the past with questions on the forum relating to some of these kinds of things and I know you both regularly commit to the repo of unreal and unity.
So I thought you’d both be the perfect people to query regarding the current capacity of cesium with AR in unreal as compared to with Unity, also if you know if others in the cesium community have accomplished this to a level similar to Unity.
Unity is excellent relating to this and I had no issues with setting up some test examples within an afternoon. Unreal has been resistant on that front though and ive had some trouble finding many examples and guides thus far. It seems like it may take a LOT of tinkering to get the above advice from the developer on the unreal team working and further, but even then im not if the outcome would be anywhere near what is already available on unity out of the box with GSCreator, unless im missing something…
And the open sourced reference given is in c# so it may present its own sets of challenges given unreal cpp.
Here are some interesting videos from the recent io maps showcase.
It’s exciting to see how quickly this tech is developing, for example they have increased the coverage of streetscape technology from 250 to over 2000 cities in the last month. It would be great to create with this to the degree showcased in the videos, but utilising unreal
I don’t have any first-hand experience with AR in Unreal. We do have a series of VR tutorials which may be useful if you haven’t seen them already:
It sounds like a fundamental challenge is in converting Unreal world coordinates to real-world coordinates. But the CesiumGeoreference should make that pretty easy. It has a number of functions for various coordinate conversions of this sort (including positions, vectors, and rotations), hopefully including what you need. If you find something you need missing, let us know.
Thanks, ill look into it and report back if I have success
Edit: after a summary read through, it seems promising. I initially read it through when I was beginning my investigation relating ato AR/Unreal/Cesium but this time around it looks like there may be some ways to utilise what’s in here for AR too given some of the other info ive come across with the above research. The good news is that AR is not essential to what we are currently creating, however it would be a great avenue to have in the future given how much tech has been leaning into AR spaces lately and how well Cesium lends itself to the utilisation of that.
Hopefully we are able get it up and running. If so I’ll be sure to post about it.
