Set up AR Foundation for Hololight Stream for Unity

Set up AR Foundation

AR Foundation is a Unity package that "enables you to create multi-platform augmented reality (AR) apps with Unity. In an AR Foundation project, you choose which AR features to enable by adding the corresponding manager components to your scene. When you build and run your app on an AR device, AR Foundation enables these features using the platform’s native AR SDK, so you can create once and deploy to the world’s leading AR platforms."[1]

Hololight Stream doesn’t fully implement all AR Foundation features. Hololight Stream uses AR Foundation as a user-friendly way to expose data and functionality. This provides some, but not all, features in Hololight Stream.

Supported AR Foundation features by device
Feature Apple Vision Pro Apple iOS and iPadOS HTC VIVE devices Lenovo ThinkReality VRX Magic Leap 2 Meta Quest devices Microsoft HoloLens 2 Windows Web Browser

2D and 3D body tracking

2D image tracking

Yes

3D Object tracking

Camera

Yes

Yes

Collaborative participants

Device tracking

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Environment probes

Face tracking

Human segmentation

Light estimation

Meshing

Yes

Yes

Occlusion

Yes[2]

Plane tracking

Yes

Yes

Point clouds

QR code tracking

Yes

Yes

Raycast

Yes

Session management

Spatial anchors

Yes

Yes

Yes

Pass-through video

Install AR Foundation

Unity imports AR Foundation when you add Hololight Stream to the project. You still need to configure AR foundation in order to take advantage of the available features.

  1. In the Hierarchy, add an AR Session Origin object (GameObject > XR > AR Session Origin)

  2. Expand the AR Session Origin object and select the AR Camera Set the AR Camera background to have alpha value of "0", within the inspector window

Example

Unity has an example project to demonstrate how AR Foundation works.

You can find the project here

These example scenes use the legacy input system for touch input which is not currently supported. You may need to update scenes that uses touch to use the new input system.

Limitations

  • Some AR Foundation features aren’t supported by Hololight Stream. This means not every AR Foundation example scene will work correctly. When using the example project with Hololight Stream, stick to the scenes which demonstrate the features marked as supported in the table above.

  • Hololight Stream does not support transparency. Transparent objects are displayed without transparency if they are directly overlaying the background.

  • To make the background transparent, make it black with an alpha value of 0.


1. “About Ar Foundation: Ar Foundation: 4.1.13.� AR Foundation | 4.1.13. Accessed February 14, 2025. https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.xr.arfoundation@4.1/manual/index.html.
2. Hololight Stream also supports this feature without using AR Foundation. See [Occlusion] for more information.