Driver Framework

The Vuforia Engine Driver Framework allows you to provide camera and tracker data from external systems to Vuforia Engine.

Driver developers can choose to distribute their driver to other application developers to take advantage of external systems.

External Camera

The Driver Framework supports developing a driver for an external camera. Create a Camera Driver using the Driver API to let Vuforia Engine interact with the external camera and provide the camera intrinsics.

See the Sample File Driver which demonstrate loading an MP4 video sequence from device for an example of using a driver.

See also the UVC Camera Driver for accessing USB cameras from Android devices.

Some platforms support external cameras without a Driver. See Using External Cameras with UWP for a guide including how to create and sideload camera intrinsics for cameras connected to UWP devices.

For specialized cameras that use the DirectShow API or vendor specific APIs, see Vuforia Camera Bridge.

External Device Tracker

Some Vuforia Engine features require a device tracker providing poses in addition to camera images. For example, Area Targets require a positional device tracker, and device tracking is strongly recommended for stable Model Target tracking.

To enable these use cases, your custom driver implementation should also provide 6DoF device tracking poses.

See Creating a Driver with a Device Tracker for more information.

NOTE: The Vuforia Driver Framework does not support the Ground Plane feature.

Creating Drivers

Manufacturers that want to provide access to a USB or a wireless camera can create their own driver and provide external data to the Vuforia Engine. Vuforia Engine developers can then take advantage of your hardware and develop applications using your driver. The Vuforia Engine Driver framework also allows you to pull image frames from other locations such as video or image files, as well as device poses stored locally or remotely.

Additionally, you can enable Vuforia Engine to run on custom devices such as eyewear devices using a driver. By developing a driver for your custom device, Vuforia Engine will be able to receive the device pose camera frames from custom hardware. See Vuforia Support for Custom Devices using Vuforia Driver

The Vuforia Engine Driver must be written in C/C++ and implemented as a standalone dynamic library (.dll file, .so file or iOS framework) which Vuforia Engine then loads at runtime.

Using Vuforia Engine Drivers

Application developers that want to use Vuforia Engine with camera and tracker data from external systems through a driver need to specify the driver before initializing Vuforia Engine. Authoring applications and experiences follows a similar process to authoring an application using the built-in camera. See Building and Using the File Driver Sample in Unity and in Native for a guide to initialize with a driver.

NOTE: When using the Driver Framework, it is strongly recommended that developers use a license key generated after April 10, 2018. Refer to the Licenses tab page in the developer portal to generate new keys.

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