@Team Zapworks: are you able to share any of your overall stats with us?

General Discussion
#1

@George, @Francesca, @Simon,

Valve Software do a regular hardware survey of gamer’s computers, and make the results public. It’s incredibly useful for game developers in terms of understanding the range of machines out there, the trends, so they can decide what to target. There’s nothing confidential or sensitive from a competitive / corporate point of view in there, but it lets us see, for example, what proportion of people are on which family of GPU, what the mode/median/etc of screen resolutions are in use.

Do you have any data like this you can share with us from your stats and logging? For example - it’d be great to see the rough breakdown of Zappar visitors’ screen sizes: what proportion are using tablets, what aspect ratios most people are using - and what the extremes are. What the rough proportions are between Android vs iOS etc, which versions.

I know we can get stats about our own particular projects, but a kinda overall picture of which devices are being used for WebAR (albeit just from Zap’s corner) would be incredibly valuable. And as long as you only report proportions - maybe rounded to the nearest 5% - there’d be no sensitive info in there.

Just a thought.

(I’m trying to work out how to position UI elements neatly and while I can test on my devices, and guess at others, I’d love to know, say, if there actually are lots of people engaging with AR that are on strange-shaped phones: whether it’s worth the time to handle all those special cases)

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#2

Hi @howiemnet,

It’s a nice feature request and I’ll be sure to log it with the team. Do you have the example that Valve share that we can take a look at?

We don’t currently log any specific device / device size data anywhere, so unfortunately don’t have anything to share. We also don’t know any information about the device when an experience is launched into WebAR, just the browser that’s used and this is on a case by case basis. This is why we log the analytics for WebAR experiences as ‘WebAR’ in the device platforms section.

You can use the device simulation in Studio to get a rough estimate on how the experience will look and feel on different device sizes. You can also use Google Chrome inspect tools or other mobile development tools to fake device sizes and see how it performs.

Something that might help is this example project: Screen Size Interpolation Example.zpp (14.4 MB)

In this project it has a controller called aspectratio and a interpolation timeline within that that is used to resize the content based on the screen size. As a little trick, you can set the device simulation to thinnest, then change the scene so it looks good and how you want it.

Then keyframe all of these positions in your interpolation timeline at 0. Next you can set the device simulation to fattest, scroll to the end of the timeline and adjust everything so it looks how you want it to look.

There is then a small snippet in the script which makes this work, you’re more than welcome to use across other projects, you’ll just need to follow the above method when setting it up from scratch.

George

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#3

Thanks George.

The Valve/Steam survey result are here: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

I think we may have to start logging the navigator.userAgent info so we can start to build up a picture. Screen size has rapidly dropped to the bottom of my list of concerns - we really need to start identifying what the actual devices are (or some other metric that gives us a broad “age of device” or OS version), as the things we’re doing are somewhat CPU intensive.

Ultimately I’d rather, say, drop particle counts down for older devices only, rather than having to limit everyone’s experience to the lowest common denominator. My iPhone may cope with 1200 particles, 6 sets of renderLayers and a ridiculous number of additive layers within them, but at the moment the only way I can tell if a device is struggling is to watch the FPS and start dropping elements out of the experience. It’d be nice to start off at a sensible detail level for the actual device in the user’s hand :slight_smile:

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