Intro to AR in Unreal 5.8

About this session

Augmented reality on phones and tablets from one Unreal project — setup that actually works, plane detection, image tracking, and deploying to a real device.

What we covered

This session walked through building augmented reality applications in Unreal Engine using the Handheld AR template for Android and iOS. Yu-Jun Yeh covered SDK setup, provisioning, packaging requirements, and common version compatibility pitfalls across modern engine releases. The class demonstrated extending the default template with custom UI controls, plane-detection spawning, and multi-target image tracking.

1. 01Configured Android and iOS development environments, SDK and NDK versions, and device developer modes.
2. 02Reviewed engine version compatibility, packaging workflows, and Vulkan versus OpenGL requirements across Unreal releases.
3. 03Explored the Handheld AR template structure across game modes, AR pawns, and UI widgets.
4. 04Inspected runtime plane detection, hit testing, and gesture manipulation for spawned placeable actors.
5. 05Added custom UMG interface buttons to toggle actor visibility and cycle dynamic material colors.
6. 06Constructed an isolated test level with lighting and mouse cursor controls to debug Blueprint logic.
7. 07Deployed interactive modifications directly to a connected Android tablet using engine Quick Launch.
8. 08Created AR Candidate Image data assets and configured simultaneous tracking within AR Session Config.
9. 09Scripted runtime geometry detection to spawn actors aligned to tracked physical reference images.

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