Tilt Five AR Glasses Development With Unity And Unreal!
What’s going on, everyone, and welcome!
In today’s post and video, we are going to take a look at Tilt Five’s AR Glasses, with a big emphasis on development. We'll cover how to set up the hardware, and we will be creating a small project for each of the development tools available. Additionally, since you know I have been learning Unreal, we will be covering Tilt Five’s Unreal tools, as well as other tools available.
3 ways to develop with the Tilt Five’s system today:
The first way is by using the Native C SDK and an NDK (Native Development Kit), where your development will be done with C or C++. This option is needed in case you are looking into integrating Tilt Five with your own solution. Perhaps you don’t want to use Unity or Unreal. I could think of a variety of reasons why this might be needed, but ultimately, that really comes down to your own requirements and preferred tech stack, such as pure C, C++, or C# which we will be discussing next.
The next dev tool is the Unity SDK with C#. Honestly, I don’t want to give it away, but this is the BEST solution in my own opinion. I know it may be a bit biased since I use Unity a lot, but recently, I am taking a different approach and stepping back when deciding what game engine to use for the right use case. So yes, Unity SDK in this case makes sense because they provide a lot of features out of the box, great SDK documentation, and more than 20 different Unity examples, including UI demos and 3D experiences.
Lastly, we have the Unreal SDK as mentioned during my intro. This is a great option; however, I feel like it lacks the functionality available in Unity. Yes, they have a Tilt Five Pawn (the pawn is the physical representation of a player within the world) which you can drag and drop into your Unreal scene, but that’s it. There are no examples other than controlling your wand, capturing input, and seeing the gameboard. To be fair, the Pawn available is probably all you need if rendering a 3D object for an enterprise solution is enough for you. But if you want to add more polish to your experience, I feel that Unity could put you ahead of the game in terms of building a more detailed AR experience.
So, which of the 3 options is best? Well, that depends on your development needs and use cases. To me, I would stay with Unity, as mentioned before, because there seem to be more detailed examples and flexibility through the Unity SDK. Unreal looks great to showcase photorealistic experiences, which would be perfect for enterprise applications. NDK sounds fun, but in my case, it is not very practical. However, honestly, what you choose really depends on your existing development talent and desire to use a specific tool.
The images below reflect some of the resources discussed in this post.
What is available right now with Tilt Five Unity SDK vs Unreal SDK?
Let me keep this brief and list all the different scenes available in Unity vs Unreal. One thing I should mention, though, is that Unreal is an amazing game engine for a non-developer. If you understand logic flows (if, else, loops, etc.), then Unreal will be amazing for you. Today, you can quickly create Blueprints which can provide very powerful behavior to your demos. Unity, on the other hand, also offers something similar to Blueprints (they call it Visual Scripting), but I feel like you still need to be a developer to take advantage of what Unity offers versus what Unreal offers today for non-developers. But anyhow, hehe, I think I got sidetracked. Let me list and show all the available scenes.
Tilt Five Unity Demos available:
Auto orientation
Distance Display
Gestures
Glasses Detection
Navigating Scene
Safe Zones
Scaling Objects
Scene Cursor
Spatial Audio
Switching Boards
Tracking Object
Wand Line Pointer
Wand Tracking
Wand Visualization
User Interface Demos: there are about 11 examples showing you how to use UI interactions, which I don’t think I should list, but trust me, you have everything you need to add UI to your game or app with their demos.
Unreal Demos available:
There are 2 pawns available with their Unreal 5.1 beta version (TiltFivePawn_Empty and TiltFivePawn_WandTracking), which should allow you to get something going pretty quickly in Unreal. I am sure they will add more examples as the plugin matures over time. Hopefully, I don’t overpromise anything hehe since they are the ones to make that call.
How easy was it to develop a custom Unity or Unreal demo?
VERY EASY, but let me give you more insight. For Unity, all you need is their SDK. Import it to Unity, create an Input Action Asset file, bind all your controls to (Tilt Five Inputs), drag and drop a Tilt Five prefab into your Unity scene, and you're done. I know it may sound as if this is simplified, but it honestly is. I was able to do basic cube interaction in less than 15 minutes for my first demo. Now, for my second demo, it took 3-4 days because I wanted to have multiplayer features. However, I love that local multiplayer is something that Tilt Five provides out of the box and not something I needed to develop from scratch. If you're interested in having me cover a step-by-step multiplayer demo, let me know in the comments.
For Unreal, in my case, it took a lot of time. I didn’t want to do anything in Unreal until I understood the flow, so that alone took about a week. After that, it was just a matter of reviewing Tilt Five's Unreal plugin, and that part was fairly quick (about half a day).
Do you recommend Tilt Five Glasses? Are they just for games?
If your goal is to have an untethered augmented reality experience, I don't believe Tilt Five is for you, unless you use their Android solution or buy a Steamdeck, which I am sure could work great with it. You also need a gameboard to project your experience to, so that's something to keep in mind. To me, Tilt Five is an amazing and great low cost AR device for any developer to get their hands into augmented reality without having to pay thousands of dollars to learn AR. They also provide a lot of content, including games, and recently released an enterprise demo which I haven’t played with yet, but it looks great if your use case is to demo high-quality 3D products and have your clients review them in real-time and in augmented reality. As a developer, they provide A TON of content, and their Discord server is very helpful. Everyone at Tilt Five is always there for you to help. Honestly, I love their company and what they’ve created. So, do I recommend it? Totally. Give it a shot or, if you’re at a local event, be sure to visit them, as they’re always at many events, including AWE, where I met their team.
Few helpful Tilt Five Resources:
Tilt Five developer resources
Tilt Five shop
Tilt Five YouTube channel which provides a variety of helpful tutorials
Thanks everyone and have an amazing day, Happy coding, Happy XR creations!
Dilmer
