How to Fix a Black Camera Feed in AR Recording on iOS in Unity

Mixed-reality capture overlays virtual content on the live camera feed. If your recording path captures only the main render target without the AR background pass, the virtual objects float on black. You must include the camera-feed background in whatever surface the recorder encodes.

How to fix it

1. Include the background pass

Ensure the ARCameraBackground renders into the same target the recorder reads, rather than only an overlay camera with no background.

2. Composite manually if needed

If recording to a custom RenderTexture, blit the AR camera background texture first, then draw virtual content on top before encoding.

3. Check capture color space

Verify the recording target's format and color space match the camera feed so the composite is not crushed to black.

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.