I can't share much code because it's proprietary, but this is a bug that's been haunting me for awhile. We have SceneKit geometry added to the ARKit face node and displayed inside an ARSCNView. It works perfectly almost all of the time, but about 1 in 100 times, nothing shows up at all. The ARSession is running, and none of the parent nodes are set to hidden. Further, when I look at Debug Memory Graph function in Xcode, the geometry appears to be entirely visible there (and doesn't seem to be set to hidden). I can see all the nodes attached to the face node perfectly within the ARSCNView of the memory graph, but on the screen, nothing shows up. This has been an issue for multiple iOS versions, so it didn't just appear with a recent update.
Has anybody run into a similar problem, or does anybody have any ideas to look into? Is it an apple bug, or is there a timing issue I might not be aware of? It's been really hard to debug because of how infrequent it is, and I haven't found it discussed on any other forums (but point me in the right direction if there is a previous discussion). Thanks!
This is pretty common practice if AR tracking is poor for some reason.
I ran into a similar problem too. I think it's definitely a tracking error which arises due to the fault of the user of AR app. Sometimes, if you're using World Tracking Config in ARKit and track a surrounding environment offhandedly or if you are tracking under inappropriate conditions – you get a sloppy tracking data which results in situation when your World Grid/Axis may be unpredictably shifted aside and your model may fly away somewhere. If such a situation arises - look for your model somewhere nearby – maybe it’s behind you.
If you're using a gadget with a LiDAR, the aforementioned situation is almost impossible, but if you're using a gadget with no LiDAR you need thoroughly track your room. Also there must be good lighting conditions and high-contrast real-world objects with distinguishable non-repetitive textures.
Related
I am considering developing an ARKit app, but before deciding to buy an iPhone I would like to ask two questions that are crucial for me. Please let me know if this has already been asked, as I could not find it somewhere else online.
The questions:
1. Let's say the motion tracking gets lost (e.g., when pointing to a white wall) and then recovers again. Does it localize in the same frame of reference or it starts from scratch? Also, are the anchors preserved?
2. Let's say I pause the session and then run it again (e.g., by leaving the app and then coming back). Does is localize back to the frame of reference from before the pause? Also, are the anchors preserved?
I am asking this because I know that localization does not work in ARCore yet and I was wondering about its state in ARKit.
Thanks!
ARKit has two or three ways to lose tracking (depending on how you think of them); each has a different effect on anchors.
1. TemporARy tracking quality issues
(I honestly fumbled caps lock in the middle of that word. My keyboard is making the puns for me!)
In the first situation you mention, and similar cases — pointing at a blank wall, giving the phone a sudden jostle, moving from a darkened area into bright light or vice versa — your app will get notified of changes to ARKit’s tracking state that effect the quality of camera pose tracking.
When the tracking state is limited, ARKit’s idea of where the world is might be out of sync with the real world, but it still has enough information to be able to relocalize when the situation passes. That includes anchors. (Try for yourself; run one of Apple’s ARKit sample code projects, and cover the camera lens for a bit while moving the phone.)
If whatever situation is affecting the tracking state persists for a long time, relocalization is unlikely to succeed. It can help to track how long you’ve been in limited tracking and offer the user a way to restart the session if things get too out of whack.
2 and 3. Session interruption and resume or restart
If something happens that interrupts ARKit’s ability to receive camera and motion data — like the incoming phone call screen on iPhone, or the user responding to an interactive notification, your app gets a sessionWasInterrupted message. There’s nothing you can do in this case (as far as session management is concerned) other than wait for a corresponding sessionInterruptionEnded message.
If the interruption was brief and the device hasn’t moved much since, there’s a chance of automatic relocalization. Of course, you can’t tell how much the device has been moved because motion tracking was off... you can make an educated guess based on the duration of interruption and how sensitive your AR experience is to tracking precision, and decide accordingly whether to restart the session. (For example, a game that has space invaders floating in the air is less affected than an app that lets the user trace out a floor plan by marking walls.)
Aside: Traditional iOS UI patterns like modal view controllers, tab views, and navigation controllers can push the view hosting an AR session away, interrupting the session and losing tracking. Like Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for AR suggest, it can be good to use things like popover views instead, so that you keep the AR experience onscreen and the session running.
When/if you do restart your AR session, you have a choice of whether to keep anchors or reset tracking. If you’ve already lost localization, what this really means is whether you keep track of anchors in arbitrary coordinate space they’re defined in (even though that space doesn’t line up with the real world anymore), or just lose all the anchors.
Short of restarting the session, though, there’s nothing that’ll cause anchors to be removed. And if you lose tracking temporarily enough to get relocalization, anchors that track real-world objects (that is, plane anchors, as opposed to the ones you manually create) should adjust back to realistic positions even if the coordinate systems doesn’t quite line up the way it used to.
I developed an app that includes the ability to preview the subdivision results of a 3D model on the fly. I have my own catmull clark subdivision functions to permanently modify the geometry, but I use the .subdivisionLevel property of the SCNGeometry to temporarily subdivide the model as a preview. In most cases previewing does not automatically mean the user will go for the permanent option.
.subdivisionLevel uses (just as MDLMesh’s subdivision, which I tried as a workaround) Pixar’s OpenSubdiv to do the actual subdivision and smoothing. It works faster than my own but more importantly it doesn’t permanently modify the vertex data I provide through a SCNGeometry source.
The problem is, I can’t get it to stop leaking memory. I first noticed this a long time ago, figured it was something in my code. I don’t think it’s just one specific IOS version and it happens in both Swift and Objective C. Eventually I set up a small example adding just 1 line to the SceneKit game template in Xcode, setting the ship’s subdivisionLevel to 1. Instruments shows that immediately results in memory leaks:
I submitted a bug report to Apple a week ago but I’m not sure I can expect a reply or a fix anytime soon or at all. The screenshot is from a test with a very small model, but even with small models (hundreds to couple of thousand vertices) it leaks a lot and fast and will lead to the app crashing.
To reproduce, create a new project in Xcode based on the SceneKit game template and add the following lines to handletap:
if result.node.geometry!.subdivisionLevel == 3 {
result.node.geometry!.subdivisionLevel = 0
} else {
result.node.geometry!.subdivisionLevel = 3
}
(Remove the ! For objective c)
Tap the ship to leak megabytes, tap it some more and it quickly adds up.
OpenSubdiv is used in 3D Studio max as well as others obviously and it appears to be in Apple’s implementation. So my question is: is there a way to fix/avoid this problem without giving up on the subdivision features of SceneKit entirely, or is a response from Apple my only chance?
Going through the WWDC videos to get an idea of how committed Apple is to OpenSubdiv and thus the chance of them fixing the leaks, I found the subdivision can be performed on the GPU by Metal since the latest SceneKit update.
Here are the required two lines (Swift) if you want to use subdivision in SceneKit or Model IO:
let tess = SCNGeometryTessellator()
geometry.tessellator = tess
(from WWDC 2017 What's new in Scenekit, 23:45 into the video)
This will cause the subdivision to be performed on the GPU (thus faster, especially at higher levels), use less memory, and most importantly, releases the memory when setting the subdivision level lower or back to zero.
I've been using ARkit and I'm loving it, but I noticed that during load tracking can gut a little jumpy (suddenly objects jump from their position a little bit off, like 1-3 cms). I've been wondering if there's a way to smooth out these jumps so it wouldn't be so distracting. Here is a short video demonstrating it.
https://youtu.be/wmMBjlLyK7w
I have been using ARKit and am also loving it I have been experiencing these issues as well and I have my theories but I am positive it is an issue with the hardware (comment which device you are using and I might be able to give a better estimate)
I believe it is the cameras on our devices and if that is the case then I would not worry about it too much because that would mean a behind the scenes problem we cant change or alter
If I'm not mistaken I remember Apple saying something about this in one of their developer classes earlier in this months keynote as I said before I wouldn't worry about it because older devices will have a harder time with the tracking because of the poorer cameras
Adding empty SKView to UICollectionView cell makes the scrolling almost impossible on iPhone 6 (iOS 9.x). Lets say collection view contains 6 items of which first 3 are visible, scrolling horizontally for next 3 items takes 3sec with jerkiness.
Here's the relating part of code:
func collectionView(collectionView: UICollectionView, cellForItemAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UICollectionViewCell
{
let cell = collectionView.dequeueReusableCellWithReuseIdentifier(ACDFilterCollectionViewCellConstants.CellIdentifier, forIndexPath: indexPath) as! ACDFilterCollectionViewCell
let filterType = filters[indexPath.row]
cell.titleLabel.text = filterType.rawValue
let skview = SKView(frame: cell.frame)
cell.filterView.addSubview(skview)
return cell
}
What should I do to have a smooth scrolling with SKViews inside my UICollectionViewCells?
On iOS 8.x I'm getting the exception on rendering this view:
I don't know what the specific answer is w.r.t. the cause of the poor performance, but I can give you some pointers as to how to proceed.
The first thing to do is to profile the code. Use Instruments to figure out where the app is spending the most time when you start scrolling. Is setting up the SKViews as they come onto the screen the expensive part? Or is it drawing all those sprite views over and over? Is it something in the sprite views that's taking a long time to draw? I hear that SKShapeNode can be a drag on performance. What happens if you remove all the subnodes from the SKViews?
Once you know where the bottleneck is, you can decide how to proceed. From your comment it sounds like you're only using SKView to render some paths, and maybe you don't need those to animate once they're drawn? If so, perhaps you can use a single offscreen SKView to render your path into an image, and then insert that image into the collection cell. People use collections full of images all the time, and they scroll beautifully.
My initial suggestion would be simply this: Scale back your expectations of what's possible in terms of framework interactions and relationship building between them.
Look into CAShapeLayer and see if it can do enough of what you're attempting to do with SKShapeNode and shaders. There is a "shouldRasterize" feature of of CAShapeLayers, and you can then apply things like Core Image filters, which might get you close to the desired result without using SKViews, SKShapeNode and SKShaders.
The problem you're up against is artificially inflated expectations of quality and performance within Apple's newer APIs and Frameworks, and their ability to interact and contain one another.
This is not your fault.
Apple has mastered the art of Showmanship and Salesmanship, long ago.
For a very long time these arts were reserved for physical product releases - the pitching and promoting of the devices people buy.
Sometime around the ailing and death of the late great Mr Jobs (may he RIP) there was a transition underway to promote far more actively the rapid development and early release of software to the App Store.
Most of this was part of the war on Android and Google. There must have been some consensus (probably amongst the supplier focused channels of the company that now lead) that getting as many apps into the store as possible was a way to nullify and/or beat Android.
To this end iOS 7 was created, UICollectionViews, AutoLayout and all manner of other "wonderful" goodies designed to remove the need (and concern) for design and designers for most app creation.
These facilities give the impression that anything and everything can be done with APIs, and that there's little to no need to consider design, nor even technical design.
So Developers plod into the frameworks, bright eyed, bushy tailed, and optimistic about their chances or realising anything they conceive... if they simply use a blend of the frameworks and APIs available to them, via the relationships they perceive to exist between frameworks from their understanding of the WWDC videos and other Apple promotional materials.
Unfortunately the aforementioned salesmanship and showmanship means that what you perceive to be possible is actually limited to the literal demonstrations you're shown. The inferred and suggested possible potential of the frameworks for interwoven relationships and success are just that... POSSIBLE POTENTIAL future functionality.
Most everything other than what is literally demonstrated is broken, or in some other way massively constrained and ill-performing. In some cases that which is demonstrated is also subsequently broken or doesn't make it to the release.
So if you're taking the time to imagine something like combining SKViews within UICollectionViews, and that this relationship should work, that assumption is your problem.
This gets far worse when you start thinking about SKShapeNodes and Shaders, both of which have known issues within SceneKit. Obviously you've found that the issue is that SKViews inside UICollectionViews aren't performant. That is the first problem. You're going to have far more problems gleaning performance from SKShapeNodes and your shaders later, and then the issue of immutability of the SKShapeNode is going to crop up for your animations, too.
It's not an incorrect assumption, you've been lead to believe this modularity of frameworks is a thing, and a huge feature of the massive frameworks of iOS.
However it's all early days, and that's not mentioned. Sprite Kit is fundamentally broken in iOS 9, you can read more about many of its problems here:
https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/14487
here:
https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/20758
here:
https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/17463
There has been no formal communication about the cause and/or nature of the issues blighting those using Scene Kit in iOS 9 that I'm aware of, despite the noise about its many issues.
One enormous issue that's plagued many is that any use of UIKit and SKViews (in either way they can inter-relate) causes huge performance problems in iOS 9. At this point there are no apparent ways around this problem other than keeping these two frameworks separate.
One big change on iOS 9 vs. iOS 8 is the switch from OpenGL to Metal for SpriteKit and SceneKit. I suggest you try overriding that default, and switch back to OpenGL, by adding the key/value pair PrefersOpenGL/YES to your Info.plist. See Technical Q&A QA1904, Specifying the renderer for SpriteKit and SceneKit.
I have a broad but interesting OpenCV question and I'm wondering where to start.
I am looking for any strategies or white papers that might help.
I need to get the position of people sitting at a conference table from a fixed overhead view. Ideally, I will assign a persistent ID to each person, and maintain a list of people with ID and coordinates. This problem could be easy in a specific case - for example, if designed for a single conference room table - but it gets harder in the general case, especially with people entering and leaving the scene.
My first question: is it a detection or a motion tracking problem? Or some combination of the two?
Well it seems like both to me. I would think you would need to take a long average of the visible area which becomes the background. Then based on your background information you can track movement of other objects.
Assigning an ID may become difficult if objects merge together (at least as far as the camera is concerned) and then separate again, say someone removing a hat placing it down and placing it back on.
But all that in mind it is possible even if it presents a challenge. I once saw a similar project tracking people in a train station using a similar approach (it was in a lecture so I can't provide a link sorry)