How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix a Tracked AR Image Anchor With Flipped Orientation in Unity

Q: What causes a tracked AR image anchor with flipped orientation in Unity?

Content is parented to the tracked image without accounting for the image's local axes, where the image plane lies in XZ and the normal is up.

Quick answer: Orient placed content using the tracked image's transform basis, remembering the image normal points along the reference image's up axis, not Unity's forward.

Image tracking in AR Foundation reports a pose where the image lies flat in the local XZ plane with its normal pointing up. If you attach content as though forward is the image normal, it ends up rotated or flipped. Aligning to the image's actual axes places content correctly on the marker.

How to fix it

1. Use the image transform basis

Parent content to the ARTrackedImage and orient it using the image's right/up/forward axes rather than assuming Unity-forward is the normal.

2. Account for the plane convention

Remember the tracked image lies in the local XZ plane with the normal along local up, so rotate content -90 degrees on X if it should stand on the image.

3. Check the reference image specs

Verify the reference image's specified physical size and orientation in the reference image library so scale and rotation match the real marker.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every mobile error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Reproduce it once with full context and the fix writes itself. The hunt is the expensive part.