Ray casts

This page is a supplement to the AR Foundation Ray casts manual. The following sections only contain information about APIs where ARCore exhibits unique platform-specific behavior.

Tip

When developing an AR app, refer to both the AR Foundation documentation as well as the required packages for each platform you support.

Optional feature support

ARCore implements the following optional features of AR Foundation's XRRaycastSubsystem:

Feature	Descriptor Property	Supported
Viewport based raycast	supportsViewportBasedRaycast	Yes
World based raycast	supportsWorldBasedRaycast	Yes
Tracked raycasts	supportsTrackedRaycasts	Yes

Supported trackables

ARCore supports ray casting against the following trackable types:

TrackableType	Supported
BoundingBox
Depth	Yes
Face
FeaturePoint	Yes
Image
Planes	Yes
PlaneEstimated	Yes
PlaneWithinBounds	Yes
PlaneWithinInfinity
PlaneWithinPolygon	Yes

Note

Refer to AR Foundation Ray cast platform support for more information on the optional features of the Raycast subsystem.

Native pointer

XRRaycast.nativePtr values returned by this package contain a pointer to the following struct:

typedef struct UnityXRNativeRaycast
{
    int version;
    void* instantPoint;
    void* anchor;
} UnityXRNativeRaycast;

This package also provides a header file containing the definitions of various native data structs including UnityXRNativeRaycast. It can be found in the package directory under Includes~/UnityXRNativePtrs.h.

Cast void* instantPoint to an ArTrackable and void* anchor to an ArAnchor handle in C++ using the following example code:

// Marhshal the native ray cast data from XRRaycast.nativePtr in C#
UnityXRNativeRaycast nativeRaycastData;
ArTrackable* pointTrackableHandle = static_cast<ArTrackable*>(nativeRaycastData.instantPoint);
ArAnchor* anchorHandle = static_cast<ArAnchor*>(nativeRaycastData.anchor);

To learn more about native pointers and their usage, refer to Extending AR Foundation.