From the course: AR Development Techniques 04: Advanced Techniques

What are asset bundles?

From the course: AR Development Techniques 04: Advanced Techniques

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What are asset bundles?

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- The AR apps that we create using Unity has assets such as 3D models, textures, materials, audio and video files, and so on. The file size of each of these assets can range from a few kilobytes to several hundred megabytes. For a simple AR app with few assets and small file sizes, this works fine, but what if we want to create an AR app for an e-commerce company which has hundreds and thousands of products. In that case we'll have hundreds and thousands of 3D models, textures and other files in our app. This will significantly increase the size of the app which might even cross the size limit of the apps that are allowed on the Apple and Google stores. So what can we do in this case? Well, instead of having all the assets locally stored in the app, we can upload these assets to a Cloud Storage and fetch those assets as in when they are required. So for example, in an AR e-commerce app with hundreds of 3D models of different products, a particular product 3D model can be downloaded when the user wants to see that product. This way we can significantly reduce the size of the app that we want to upload on the app stores. We cannot directly upload these assets to the Cloud Storage and then fidget in the app. We have to pack these assets and bundles known as AssetBundles and then upload these AssetBundles to the Cloud Storage. We can then download an AssetBundle in the app when required and get the assets stored inside it. We can have any number of AssetBundles in our app and each AssetBundle can have multiple assets. In the next video, we'll see how to add financial models into AssetBundles and create AssetBundle files that can be uploaded to the Cloud Storage.

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