The Vuforia SDK and Unity3D Game Engine : Evaluating Performance on Android Devices

Abstract: This paper evaluates major features of PTC’s augmented reality SDK Vuforia, available for Android, iOS and the Unity3D game engine. The performance of these features are evaluated in terms of frame rate and power consumption and the testing prototypes are developed using Unity3D. Augmented reality is a rapidly growing medium and the Vuforia SDK is very popular with over 325 000 registered developers and thousands of published applications. Despite being used to such extents, there are surprisingly few works evaluating different aspects of its performance. This paper provides an introduction to augmented reality and describes the technology used by the Vuforia SDK to deliver said features. This paper shows that Vuforia is capable of maintaining sufficient performance with interactive frame rates over 20 Hz in most cases. The power consumption of these features reduces the battery lifetime to acceptable levels, suitable for hand-held devices. In some cases, however, the performance in terms of frame rate reaches levels lower than recommended. These cases should be considered by developers looking to use Vuforia.