Firstly, thanks very much for the very useful and well moderated forum.

I am AR enthusiast from Italy that is particularly interested in the application of this technology to create AR experiences in cities and architecture. I have no experience in game development and very limited knowledge of programming. Luckily it is full of great guides out there and I am willing to learn!

I face a dilemma. Which engine to use for AR development? Unity or Ureal? Below some considerations that I came up with after looking for threads similar to this one.

Unreal:

-PRO: many free add-ons, high quality of images,

-CONS: Low quality of AR demos and videos (shaky and not fluid)

Unity:
-PRO: High quality of AR demos and videos (Fluid and stable), Vuforia easy to use, large dev community.

-CONS: few free add-ons, quality of images slightly lower than Unreal.

Based on your experience with AR which one would you suggest me? Which one is easier to approach for a beginner like me?

Many thanks in advance! :lol:

Fregazoid

Since you write that you have no programming experience or game development experience, both will have some steep learning curves for you.

Both of them are free, so download both and try them for a few weeks. Whichever you like more, use that.

Thanks for the suggestion. There is any difference in terms of AR potential?

From what I have seen so far AR demos with Unity look so much better than Unreal.

You cannot base your opinion on a "demo" because the technology to build beautiful or ugly things isn't defined by the tool-set, but by the developers and artists. Both Unreal and Unity are a tool for publishing content to multiple devices without having to develop independent applications.

Don't get hooked by the pretty pictures/demos, understand what you're trying to achieve and pick the right tool for the job.

Happy coding!

Regarding the potential of the engines, they are both highly capable, and both have been used to build successful VR titles by professional teams.


You write that you are a beginner with no appreciable experience in programming or making games. Both engines likely provide far more power and flexibility than you will require on your projects.

There are likely to be issues with your projects --- there are issues in nearly all projects --- but these typically stem from the developers either not properly understanding their tools or not building the software in respect to system limits.

A single hobby developer is unlikely to reach the boundaries of the system, except perhaps through bugs and defects in the code.

Agree with most comments as at this beginner stage, either Unity or Unreal are the same.

My preference would go towards Unity because its AR plugin (Vuforia) seems much better than Unreal AR plugin (Unreal4AR). There are more tutorials, the community is larger and the demos look smother.

I will choose unreal. But purely because I favor graphics...

Having done some VR myself I would recommend Unreal, the setup needed to use VR with Unreal is as simple as turning on the VR plugin that is in all Unreal engines 4.11 or higher.

The demos doesn't do it justice as many of those where made with out much focus on the camera. It's very easy to smooth things out in Unreal.

The only downside I had with Unreal was, because of how easy things where, when it got to the point where I wanted to use the VR for something that wasn't part of the pre-made library, I had no idea how to add it in.

In the end I had to spend over a week browsing the source code to learn how to add in my own.

I think this really depends on the AR hardware platform you want to use.

Unity support Hololens. Unreal does not (yet).

I don't know what other major AR platforms are out there yet. But if I was going AR, I'd probably go Unity, even though I love Unreal.

I think this really depends on the AR hardware platform you want to use.

Unity support Hololens. Unreal does not (yet).

I don't know what other major AR platforms are out there yet. But if I was going AR, I'd probably go Unity, even though I love Unreal.

IIRC there's a fork of Unreal Engine by Microsoft which has Hololens support.