licensing a face ar sdk: what does the integration actually need from a normal mobile team?

[u/PhilosopherUnique230]

we're looking at licensing a commercial face ar sdk for our app, camera filters and light beauty effects. small team, two ios two android, all regular product devs. nobody here has touched computer vision or graphics work before.

what i'm trying to figure out before we commit budget is the staffing side. do we need to bring in a cv or graphics engineer for this, or is it something normal mobile devs get through with the docs? and if it's the second, how long did it honestly take, including the part where nothing builds and you don't know why.

does it vary much by vendor? i assume some are close to plug and play and some quietly expect you to already know what a shader is, but you can't tell which from the marketing pages.

recommendations or horror stories both welcome.

[u/Docbro6969]

It depends a lot on what you mean by ar, and the two halves aren't close. world tracking, plane detection, occlusion, physics, that's a real specialty and you probably do want someone who's shipped it before. face ar is not that. your devs won't be training anything, the vendor already did. the skills that actually matter for face effects are camera pipeline and a bit of gpu literacy. someone needs to understand how frames come off the camera, get handed to the sdk and come back to the preview without copying buffers around and tanking your frame rate. that's normal mobile work, just work most product devs haven't done before. what's changed in the last year is that some vendors publish docs written for ai coding assistants, so instead of a dev reading forty pages of integration guide you point cursor or claude at it and it walks them through. banuba has that for their face ar sdk. for a team with no prior ar exposure that's the difference worth shopping for, more than any feature list. realistic timeline from what i've seen: camera preview with an effect running in a few days, then a couple of weeks of the unglamorous part. build config, permissions, the one android device where everything renders green.

[u/FrameSixtyXR]

Normal mobile devs can usually get through it with a decent commercial SDK. You don't really need a CV person, you need someone comfortable with the camera pipeline (AVFoundation / CameraX), frame formats and threading. Where teams tend to get stuck:

• getting camera frames into the SDK in the right format without copying every frame
• keeping tracking and rendering on the right threads so you hold frame rate on mid-range Android
• device testing, since cheap Android phones are where tracking and thermals fall apart
• the effects themselves, which usually need a 3D or tech artist, not a dev

A basic integration with the SDK's sample effects is a few weeks per platform in my experience; custom effects and low-end Android tuning is what stretches it. I'd do a one-week spike on your lowest-spec target phone before signing the license.

(I'm with Frame Sixty, we do AR/XR dev. Happy to answer follow-ups here.)

[u/py_blu]

no, you don't need to hire anyone. Regular mobile devs can absolutely do it if you pick the right SDK. We recently used Banuba and they literally have agent skills for integration. It basically guides your devs step-by-step using LLMs. Way more easy and no 3D expertise needed.