Unity Mars Simulation system helps to speed up your development process. You can use Simulation to test your AR app within the Editor instead of deploying to a device, reducing iteration time. Use Prefabs or your own defined environments, which act as snapshots of the real world, to see how AR content might interact with surfaces and other world data.

Unity’s AR Foundation provides the abstraction layer between AR device providers and Unity. Together, Unity Mars and AR Foundation help you deploy to ARCore, ARKit, and HoloLens devices. Data from AR Foundation can be used in Unity Mars’s Simulation feature. Learn how they work together in our session on building games for AR.

The Rules workflow is a UI view and method for describing AR layout and behavior in plain language. This provides you with a clear starting point for creating your AR experiences and an easy way to manage hierarchies and describe interactions. For example, you could create a Rule which would add dressing to every window in a given scene.

The Rules workflow has advanced features like Proxy Groups, which lets you query for a number of real objects. For example, you could identify a series of images in an art gallery and provide AR overlays.

Unity Mars 1.4 brings two new features, meshing and Project Validation. Updates to the Simulation system make it easier to work with. Meshing helps with improved occlusion and physics, so AR content behaves and looks better. The Project Validation tool automates platform configuration to ensure that your app deploys seamlessly to ARCore, ARkit, and HoloLens devices. The Simulation view has received a UX overhaul, simplifying its configuration.

The AR Companion app (ARCA) helps save time by capturing environment data with mobile devices and provides tools for light AR scene authoring on device. You can bring local or remote data, videos, photos, and objects from mobile devices to the Unity Editor via cloud sync, while on-device authoring enables you to mock up scenes for faster prototyping.

Data captured from the AR Companion app can be used in Mars to create Simulation views, add objects to scenes, create image markers, and more. Unity Mars customers get 10 GB of cloud storage for syncing data between mobile devices and the Editor.