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I want to start developing a new Android Augmented Reality app and I am not sure which render engine to use. I heard that sceneform is deprecated (Google Sceneform – Is it deprecated? Any replacement?).

Are there any recommondations recommendations which render engine to use, if one does not want to use unreal or unity?

I know that there is the possibility to use e.g. sceneform 1.16 (gltf/glb support is necessary), but the functionality is not very reliable (e.g. material texture change does not work).

If I am dependent on future support and development, which render engine would be the best option?

nphi
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  • It really depends. Between Unity & Unreal engine, Unity is more mobile friendly in my opinion. Unreal is better if you want to build more realistic looking games. If you have experience with C# (or Java) it will be lot easier for you to start with Unity. – hardartcore Feb 15 '21 at 13:56
  • Sorry, my fault, i forgot a word in the text. I edited it now. The question is, if I do NOT want to use unreal or unity – nphi Feb 15 '21 at 13:57
  • There's one that Google uses with their Maps app, but I cannot remember the name of it. You would have to learn some new language called Kotlin. I'm not up for learning another computer language. I've been using java for over a decade and I still can't wrap my brain around it... – YinOrYan Feb 17 '21 at 21:38

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The Android ARCore developer guidelines currently use OpenGL as the rendering engine. You can look at how it is integrated in the code in the samples directory in the ARCore SDK repository here: https://github.com/google-ar/arcore-android-sdk

It is not as straightforward as Sceneform, but it may meet your needs.

Sceneform is deprecated as you say but there are some efforts to keep it alive - the most prominent, I think, is this one:

This repository has been updated to support AndroidX and glTF/glTB instead of SFA and SFB assets. It has been tested and used by a number of people, but I think it will take time to see if there are enough number of users and developers getting involved to keep it up to date.

Mick
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