how can I look away from a marker and still see my 3D object anchored to the location?

Hi Campanoodle,

There is a way to do this, but it's not ideal because not all devices support it. If you go down this route, make sure you have a way to fallback to other behavior.

The basic plan is:

1) Use Device Tracking component with World tracking mode to position the camera based on real world movement

2) Place a dummy object under the Marker tracking component, so that it updates its position based on marker tracking

3) Your actual marker content (graphic, character, etc) should be on its own, outside of the Image Marker hierarchy. Let's just call this "Content".

4) A script should disable Content on initialization and then monitor the Marker Tracking component. As soon as marker tracking begins, Content should be reenabled. Whenever marker tracking is occurring, the Content position and rotation should be updated to match the dummy object under marker tracking.

The result of this is that whenever marker tracking is available, the Content will be positioned to match the marker. When marker tracking is not available, Content will rely on device tracking to keep it positioned correctly. 

Here's a simple example of this script:

// @input Component.MarkerTrackingComponent markerTracking
// @input SceneObject dummyObject
// @input SceneObject contentObject

script.contentObject.enabled = false;

var tran = script.contentObject.getTransform();

var tracker = script.markerTracking;
var targetTran = script.dummyObject.getTransform();

script.createEvent("UpdateEvent").bind(function(){
    if (tracker.isTracking()) {
        script.contentObject.enabled = true;
        tran.setWorldPosition(targetTran.getWorldPosition());
        tran.setWorldRotation(targetTran.getWorldRotation());
        tran.setLocalScale(targetTran.getWorldScale());
    }
});

Again, be careful with this because it will only work on devices that support World tracking mode. You may want to fallback to some other behavior if it's not supported.See the Device Tracking API page for a full list of methods available. It will probably look something like this:

if (script.markerTracking.isDeviceTrackingModeSupported(DeviceTrackingMode.World)) {
    // Do full behavior
} else {
    // Do fallback behavior
}

Let me know if you have any more questions!

Jacob