Is there a preferred method of installing the Google AR Core apk (ar-sample.apk) onto an Android device such as a Samsung Galaxy S21?
Is it recommended to use a side loading tool (if so what is the best tool to use?) to install the apk or is it a simple case of copying the apk on to the device and executing?
Please consult the documentation section: ARCore Client (Android) — NVIDIA CloudXR SDK documentation
If you plan on developing, just build the sample client yourself from android studio, and run from there.
If just trying to test out the client, then any suitable side-loading approach will work. The easiest is to use ADB command line, or a GUI that sits on top of ADB. (in effect what Android Studio itself is doing…).
Dave, I’m curious about the Android ARCore client, can you use it to run a stereo VR setup on a mobile phone with 6DOF tracking ala Daydream? Daydream has a 6DOF option using ARCore Depth API to reconstruct the HMD pose (including translation) using either the RGB cameras or, where available a ToF sensor.
There are 5 million GearVR shells out there just sitting around, collecting dust. I’d much rather use that (w 6DOF) than just holding up my Galaxy phone. Just my 0.02$
at the moment, there is no stereo AR, just to be clear – you’d need one of the newer XR headsets with stereo cameras from hw side, and on sw side we’ve not developed for that case (i.e., dual cameras). Further the server doesn’t currently support sending stereo AR streams, that is two video streams with alpha channels. I imagine we’ll get all this supported at some point, but not near future.
we also don’t have support for gearvr, since oculus deprecated it a while back. In theory it should be possible to build a client app with an older sdk that works on the gearvr, but I can’t guarantee it. we’ve never supported daydream (well, if we did, it was prototype and before my time).
Can you build a client for a phone that somehow uses ARCore to build your pose but not to capture camera, and have the server render as if yet another stereo hmd? I guess that might be possible, I don’t know what the gearvr looks like. I recall daydream 100% covered up cameras, so wouldn’t be able to trivially use them if that’s the case.
So in THEORY, running ARCore to give you something close to 6dof, in ‘phone goggles’ like daydream but with cutout fo camera, and otherwise specifying to the server that you are a Quest or something, MIGHT work. note there are then issues around input, as in arcore app you use screen directly. I think most of the 3dof controller support has been removed from the CXR samples, as really you can’t do much with a single 3dof controller (I tried, really I did… :) ). So you might need to implement something like gamepad support (which on android is fairly generic code).
Hope that all helps, even if it wasn’t the answer you were looking for! ;-)