ARKit shows a map on floor/bottom of a screen

Question

Via ARKit, I want to place indoor map on floor. Currently I tried 2 things:

1. I've placed large Plane below camera and above floor, But it causes quite drift. Does not move well when we walk, and overall experience is not overwhelming.
2. Saw a solution where you can identify horizontal plane, but it has its own issues.

So is it really possible with good results?

Answer 1

Devices with LiDAR

The LiDAR scanner has its advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage of LiDAR is its ability to almost instantly reconstruct floor and walls, then you can easily attach any 3D model to the resulted surface – a model will be stable, it will not drift, so a user's AR experience will be overwhelming, as you said. Also, an important advantage of LiDAR is the excellent performance in environment with poor lighting and with poor textures.

Here you can read about Occlusion feature and some of the LiDAR peculiarities. Good news: LiDAR perfectly works in conjunction with the Plane Detection option.

ARKit subdivides the reconstructed scene into ARMeshAnchors which give you access to polygonal geometry and surface classification.

ARMeshAnchor().geometry.classification
ARMeshAnchor().geometry.faces
ARMeshAnchor().geometry.vertices
ARMeshAnchor().transform.columns.3

Devices without LiDAR

In the absence of a LiDAR scanner, we can only detect horizontal and vertical surfaces using the Plane Detection feature. I can say that all AR frameworks (including ARKit and RealityKit) are much better and faster in defining horizontal surfaces, as opposed to vertical ones.

However, Detected Planes are less stable compared to Reconstructed Surfaces, and therefore, a slight drifting is possible sometimes. To successfully complete the Plane Detection stage, you need a well-lit room and good-for-tracking surrounding objects' textures.

ARKit calls your delegate's renderer(_:didAdd:for:) with a ARPlaneAnchor for each unique vertical and/or horizontal surface. And each plane anchor provides details about the surface – its world position, dimensions and real-world surfaces' classification.

In addition to the above, the delegate method called renderer(_:didUpdate:for:) is required to merge multiple coplanar Detected Planes into bigger resulting Detected Plane (a surface of a floor, for example).

ARPlaneAnchor().classification
ARPlaneAnchor().extent
ARPlaneAnchor().alignment
ARPlaneAnchor().center

Is it really possible with good results?

Yes, in both cases, it's possible to attach a map without drifting – whether you're using Plane Detection or Scene Reconstruction.