ARKit – Get current position of ARCamera in a scene

Question

I'm in the process of learning both ARKit and Scenekit concurrently, and it's been a bit of a challenge.

With a ARWorldTrackingSessionConfiguration session created, I was wondering if anyone knew of a way to get the position of the user's 'camera' in the scene session. The idea is I want to animate an object towards the user's current position.

let reaperScene = SCNScene(named: "reaper.dae")!
let reaperNode = reaperScene.rootNode.childNode(withName: "reaper", recursively: true)!
reaperNode.position = SCNVector3Make(0, 0, -1)
let scene = SCNScene()
scene.rootNode.addChildNode(reaperNode)

// some unknown amount of time later   
let currentCameraPosition = sceneView.pointOfView?.position
let moveAction = SCNAction.move(to: currentCameraPosition!, duration: 1.0)
reaperNode.runAction(moveAction)

However, it seems that currentCameraPosition is always [0,0,0], even though I am moving the camera around. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? Eventually the idea is I would rotate the object around an invisible sphere until it is in front of the camera and then animate it in, doing something similar to this: Rotate SCNCamera node looking at an object around an imaginary sphere (that way the user sees the object animate towards them)

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Set yourself as the ARSession.delegate. Than you can implement session(_:didUpdate:) which will give you an ARFrame for every frame processed in your session. The frame has an camera property that holds information on the cameras transform, rotation and position.

func session(_ session: ARSession, didUpdate frame: ARFrame) {
    // Do something with the new transform
    let currentTransform = frame.camera.transform
    doSomething(with: currentTransform)
}

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As rickster pointed out you always can get the current ARFrame and the camera position through it by calling session.currentFrame. This is useful if you need the position just once, eg to move a node where the camera has been but you should use the delegate method if you want to get updates on the camera's position.