When developing for mobile applications its important to be aware of how intensive your code is and to try and optimise it at every point possible. One of the optimisations I have been looking into is dynamically loading NFT markers so as not to create a huge wait when the application first loads.

From testing I have deduced that each NFT marker added into the scene adds around 1.5-2.5 seconds of load time. This may not seem like much but when you consider that we are planning on having 3 NFT’s for each writer, and that we may end up having more than 3 writers in total those numbers quickly add up.

Unfortunately ARToolKit 5 doesn’t allow for dynamic NFT loading, so after some testing I have come up with a cleaver way to get around the problem. Instead of loading a new scene each time the player switches MapView to ARView (or vice versa) I am instancing an ARcontroller that is relevant to each writer and only stopping and starting this when the user needs those specific NFTs.  To put simply this allows for the software to only load the NFT’s relevant to the writer in the users location. It also then allows for very quick transitions between MapView and ARview by utilising camera culling masks