Unity, Xiamarin, Vuforia, Wikitude: Performance Comparison of Augmented Reality Applications in a Liquid Cooling Process

Augmented reality (AR) is a tool that superimposes virtual elements on the real world, through a mobile device, combining the physical and virtual world in real time. This technology has driven the creation of applications that improve learning in areas such as industry, health, education through the use of a mobile device or glasses to display information about an object; the development of these applications requires development platforms such as Unity and Xamarin and libraries such as Vuforia or Wikitude to develop programming to interact between the real and virtual world. However, there is limited information to choose the platform-library set that is best adapted to take advantage of the physical resources of the devices, generating problems in the execution of the applications. This article compares the resources used when working with different platform-library combinations in the development of an application for a liquid cooling plant; the analysis focuses on the use of resources on both computers and mobile devices. The comparison is established on the effect on the processor and memory of the computer at different stages of development, while for the mobile device the battery consumption, temperature, RAM consumption and frequency at different stages of execution are considered. The results determined that the best option is to work on a computer with an i7 processor for any platform-library, but for mobile devices the best results were Xamarin-Wikitude obtaining agility in the execution of the application.