Call for Unified Cloud Anchor Solution

Unity Development
1

This is a call for opening up discussions regard creating a unified solution for Cloud Anchors.

We're so saddened by the fact that there's still no open standard for anchoring content to the real world. We want to build platform-agnostic co-located experiences for any MR/AR capable devices (AR-kit, AR Core, HL2, ML2, Quest Pro, etc.).

Azure Spatial Anchors has come a long way, and would be our go-to solution for space tracking - except it doesn't work on the MagicLeap.

If it worked, we would love to integrate it with Microsofts World Locking Tools in order to easily create co-located multiplayer experiences, but also in general for having a much more robust solution to anchoring bigger objects and working with physics between anchors (these issues and solutions are described in the documentation).
World Locking Tools promises a superior approach to anchoring content compared to traditional anchors while building on top of traditional "spatial anchors" and staying platform agnostic.

An alternative is using Area Targets from vuforia. However, these targets can only be generated and used in the same runtime on Lidar enabled iOS devices, requiring customers to generate co-located experiences using other third party hardware than what the experience is being run on.

Lastly - and this is our current solution - is using visual markers like QR or Aruco markers, or 3D model targets for aligning a virtual origin to the physical space. When only using one marker, this introduces drifting the further away from the origin you get (or just general bad tracking in some devices). This could again be mitigated by using multiple anchors and World Locking Tools to lock the virtual space to multiple physical anchors, but wouldn't it be much nicer if these where all just cross-platform anchors?

That's what this post is about. Let's push for a common cloud-anchor/point-cloud/spatial-map/whatever-you-wanna-call-it standard.

Here's my small contribution - A ML2 Spongy anchor data provider for WLT;
MagicLeap2 - Spongy Anchor data provider.zip (6.0 KB)

Let me know what everyone else thinks!

3 Likes
2

@TheMunk I downloaded the ZIP but cannot unzip it. The size is about 6KB. Is this ZIP file corrupt? Also, I don't know if Magic Leap's AR Cloud and the cloud anchor you mentioned are different, but have you tried the AR Cloud that Magic Leap offers?

3

I've updated the zip file - and yes, its small :slight_smile:

We are in the process of installing ARCloud within our enterprise, but as we explained to the MagicLeap representatives what you offer doesn't work on any other platform than the MagicLeap 2 headset. And the repsonse was, that MagicLeap aren't currently exploring extending the ARCloud/anchor API to other platforms - and that they would recommend me creating this post to facilitate discussions.

1 Like
4

@TheMunk Magic Leap AR Cloud currently only supports Magic Leap 2, but will be improved to work with other devices in the future. Below is the response we received from Magic Leap.

At this point, we are only supporting ML2 devices on AR Cloud. We may consider adding other devices in the future

5

Is the class you shared that handles the anchoring of the ZIP file actually used in the application you developed?

If you have an Example on using this code, I can try it.

6

You can download any of the WLT sample scenes and import my scripts to select MagicLeap2 as the anchor provider for the system;

image
image383×789 42.7 KB

Unfortunately I can't share our project.