Unity overview

ARCore provides two different SDKs for using Unity to develop AR apps for Android and iOS:

ARCore SDK for Unity: ARCore SDK for Unity is a standalone SDK that lets you access all of ARCore's features. This SDK is available as a *.unitypackage, available from the ARCore Downloads page.
ARCore Extensions for Unity: ARCore Extensions is a package that provides additional ARCore functionality that is designed to be used with Unity's AR Foundation. ARCore Extensions can be downloaded and installed from the Unity Package Manager.

Available features by development platform

Feature	ARCore SDK for Unity (targeting Android)	ARCore SDK for Unity (targeting iOS)	AR Foundation with ARCore XR Plugin and ARCore Extensions (targeting Android)
Supported Unity versions	Unity 2017.4.34f1 or later	Unity 2017.4.34f1 or later	Unity 2019.3.15f1 or later
Plane finding	✓	Provided by AR Foundation	Provided by AR Foundation
Local anchors	✓	Provided by AR Foundation	Provided by AR Foundation
Basic light estimation	✓	Provided by AR Foundation	Provided by AR Foundation
Environmental HDR light estimation	✓	not available	not available
Augmented Images	✓	not available	Provided by AR Foundation
Augmented Faces	✓	Provided by Augmented Faces SDK	Provided by AR Foundation
Cloud Anchors	✓	Provided by Cloud Anchors SDK	Provided by ARCore Extensions
Depth API	✓	not available	Requires AR Foundation `4.1.0-preview.2` or later and ARCore XR Plugin `4.1.0-preview.2` or later
AR camera background image	✓	Provided by AR Foundation	Provided by AR Foundation
CPU image access	✓	Provided by AR Foundation	Provided by AR Foundation
GPU texture access	✓	not available	not available
Multithreaded rendering	✓	✓	Requires AR Foundation `2.1.0-preview.4` or later