Book Image

Augmented Reality for Android Application Development

Book Image

Augmented Reality for Android Application Development

Overview of this book

Augmented Reality offers the magical effect of blending the physical world with the virtual world, which brings applications from your screen into your hands. AR redefines advertising and gaming, as well as education. It will soon become a technology that will have to be mastered as a necessity by mobile application developers. Augmented Reality for Android Application Development enables you to implement sensor-based and computer vision-based AR applications on Android devices. You will learn about the theoretical foundations and practical details of implemented AR applications, and you will be provided with hands-on examples that will enable you to quickly develop and deploy novel AR applications on your own. Augmented Reality for Android Application Development will help you learn the basics of developing mobile AR browsers, how to integrate and animate 3D objects easily with the JMonkeyEngine, how to unleash the power of computer vision-based AR using the Vuforia AR SDK, and will teach you about popular interaction metaphors. You will get comprehensive knowledge of how to implement a wide variety of AR apps using hands-on examples. This book will make you aware of how to use the AR engine, Android layout, and overlays, and how to use ARToolkit. Finally, you will be able to apply this knowledge to make a stunning AR application.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Augmented Reality for Android Application Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Augmented Reality Concepts and Tools
Index

Knowing where you are – handling GPS


In this section, we will look at one of the major approaches for mobile AR and sensor-based AR (see Chapter 1, Augmented Reality Concepts and Tools), which uses global tracking. Global tracking refers to tracking in a global reference frame (world coordinate system), which can encompass the whole earth. We will first look at the position aspect, and then the location sensor built on your phone that will be used for AR. We will learn how to retrieve information from it using the Android API and will integrate its position information into JME.

GPS and GNSS

So we need to track the position of the user to know where he/she is located in the real world. While we say we track the user, handheld AR applications actually track the position of the device.

Note

User tracking versus device tracking

To create a fully-immersive AR application, you ideally need to know where the device is, where the body of the user in reference to the device is, and where the eyes...