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Comment by apetresc | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty clear from the title; it's an AR app that projects an emulator over top of your controller.

Sounds pointless if you're using a phone as your window into AR, but if you were to imagine this on a headset like a Quest or Vision Pro, it would basically "turn" any controller into a handheld retro console.

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> It's pretty clear from the title; it's an AR app that projects an emulator over top of your controller.

It's not that clear at all if this is your take away -- its not just projecting a 2d surface emulators normally generate, but is instead taking that 3d data from the emulator and projecting _that_ into space. If you move the controller

> this on a headset like a Quest

None of the Quest give camera access to the apps, and there's currently no AR target support through the cameras. :(

The camera is only used to track the controller, the actual 3D data is pulled from the game files. The Quest API does let you layer elements onto the passthrough view[0], so it could work, the game would just hover in front of you instead of tracking the controller.

[0] https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/unity/unity-passt...

Then why isn't it running on Android? That would instantly work on the Quest. Why would someone voluntarily subject themselves to xcode? People need to treat themselves better.

ARkit presumably. Android just doesn't have an AR ecosystem that's as mature.

Which is interesting, because the release of ARKit doesn’t pre-date that of Android’s ARCore by even a whole year, and as I recall Google was dabbling in AR before Apple was. The difference is that ARKit has received consistent attention and iteration.

Well, there was a clear and specific product driving it in the Apple camp. Not just to get it ready for the dev kit for VisionOS devices but to get their dev teams a constant flow of useful data from any AR apps created in ARKit along the way that have likely fed into the design decisions and roadmap of the entire project.

I’m pretty sure ARKit has been 99.99% in existence as a way of getting as much real world data as possible for the headset design and ‘spacial computing platform’ project.

This sort of stuff also just seems to be way more in Apple’s wheelhouse. Apple is a device company, providing these kinds of developer libraries is, like, table stakes. For Google, supporting hardware isn’t in their DNA, right?

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