Rift Experiment #3: Limitations of Vuforia
First of all, I have really loved the Vuforia toolkit for making AR prototypes, but I ran into a limitation with it this week which really screws up some of my prototyping...For whatever reason, Qualcomm has decided to make it so that Vuforia doesn't publish to Windows or Mac, it only publishes to Andriod or IOS. Prior to the Rift and Glass, all of my prototyping was on Android, so I never noticed, but with the Rift and Leap Motion on PC, I needed a standalone solution for prototyping.
What's weird is that they have a plugin that allows you to use the "play" mode in unity to preview your AR on the PC, but it won't let you run a standalone windows build. This makes me think this is deliberate, either Google or Apple would like PC left out of this, so they made a deal.
That aside, I managed to get the Leap Motion stuff working within my Rift Tuscany AR demo, and this screenshot is of a menu system that works by looking at it ( I call it "look UI"), and you can reach out and move it around and stick it to parts of your world as you see fit using the hand gestures with the Leap Motion.
