Instant tracking: Can we get feedback on trackability of the surface?

Being able to instantly track something to the floor, or a desk, is ace. It needs to be something with some texture to it for the vision tech to work well, though, and it would be nice to be able to direct the user elsewhere if they’re pointing at something too bland.

@simon - within the instant tracking code, is there any simple “quality of surface for tracking” metric we can have access to please? That way, if a user points at something flat and featureless but tries to initiate the experience, we can put a friendly message up to direct them toward something more textured. We could poll a function, perhaps, during the initial acquisition stage.

The current workaround is to just put instruction text up saying “point at the floor or a desk - a textured surface”, but we’ve no way to tell whether the surface actually is going to be any good. Ideally I’d like to be able to differentiate between these good and bad examples so I can selectively put a message up if necessary:

Screenshot 2022-01-06 at 17.21.11Screenshot 2022-01-06 at 17.21.01

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Hi @howiemnet,

It’s a great suggestion and I definitely see the use case. There’s nothing exposed as-yet but it’s something we’ll think about for later in the beta of the new implementation.

Right now the new beta just needs one trackable point in the vicinity of the anchor to lock to the depth of that point (plus some other points elsewhere in the image for tracking). We have plans to take multiple points in the neighbourhood into account too (which will allow more accurate placement when there is an obvious surface). So effectively what is needed to give a good track is still evolving a bit internally, so we haven’t yet got to the stage of exposing that.

I should also mention that like the previous Instant Tracking approach it will fall-back to gyro and lock-on again somewhere else if new image texture appears, so the aim isn’t to explicitly lock to one and only one position. That said, I definitely do see the value for the initial placement UI in feeding back whether a placement at that point would initially result in full tracking or the gyro fallback, and then you can decide if you explicitly want to prevent the “placement” action until full tracking is available.

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