Urho3d Could Be a Development Bridge Between HoloLens & ARKit




Developers looking to create shared experiences that support both HoloLens as well as ARKit may be able to get it working in Unity since that the engine supports both platforms — though, the amount of effort it might take to get that working could be a bit much. Up to this point, Unity has been the only real approach to attempt this combination — at least, until now.

According to a report by MSPoweruser, UrhoSharp, a small and lightweight game engine in similar scope to the Apple SceneKit and SpriteKit, which currently supports Android, iOS, Windows (including HoloLens), and macOS, recently added ARKit support.

Microsoft software developer Egor Bogatov (formerly of Xamarin, which Microsoft purchased) has released a video of UrhoSharp working on an iPhone through the ARKit. He also released the corresponding code to a GitHub repository as well.

UrhoSharp is a .NET and Xamarin-based wrapper for the Urho3D game engine, a full-featured 2D and 3D cross-platform C++ game engine. The feature list for Urho3D is too long to list here, but some of the more notable features that UrhoSharp supports are:

• support for Direct X And OpenGL rendering standards
• physics simulation
• await/async .NET functionality
• 2D integration into 3D scenes
• networking
• audio playback

While this demo does not demonstrate the HoloLens and iPhone gap being bridged, it is fair to assume that between UrhoSharp and Unity both currently supporting both platforms, it won't be long before someone figures out the solution. And this tool set could likely simplify that process.