ARWorldMappingStatus: how to improve to extending or even mapped?

Question

I'm playing around with ARKit 2.0 and I'm logging the current ARWorldMappingStatus; but most of the time, I only get .limited although there are lots of planes and although I'm moving around my phone a lot. Is this due to the beta status or am I missing something which can improve the mapping?

When showing featurePoints I see that there are only a few points found... I guess this is the problem, but how to increase the amount of featurepoints found?

Answer 1

World mapping status does, as you've suspected, correlate to the set feature points seen in the surrounding real-world environment (not just the number in the current frame, but the number seen over time as the device has moved around, and their spatial relationships to each other).

If you're in an environment where you're not seeing many feature points — generally a problem for world tracking, though world mapping is more sensitive to it — you'll need to make some changes to the environment. (Or move to some other environment.) Possible reasons for lack of feature points include:

• Poor lighting — dim light means the camera gets a blurry / noisy image, which interferes with feature point identification.
• Lack of surface detail — plain white tables or walls don't have many high-local-contrast areas to serve as feature points.
• Confusing surface detail — reflective surfaces show possible feature points that don't correlate to device motion.