Book Image

Learn ARCore - Fundamentals of Google ARCore

Book Image

Learn ARCore - Fundamentals of Google ARCore

Overview of this book

Are you a mobile developer or web developer who wants to create immersive and cool Augmented Reality apps with the latest Google ARCore platform? If so, this book will help you jump right into developing with ARCore and will help you create a step by step AR app easily. This book will teach you how to implement the core features of ARCore starting from the fundamentals of 3D rendering to more advanced concepts such as lighting, shaders, Machine Learning, and others. We’ll begin with the basics of building a project on three platforms: web, Android, and Unity. Next, we’ll go through the ARCore concepts of motion tracking, environmental understanding, and light estimation. For each core concept, you’ll work on a practical project to use and extend the ARCore feature, from learning the basics of 3D rendering and lighting to exploring more advanced concepts. You’ll write custom shaders to light virtual objects in AR, then build a neural network to recognize the environment and explore even grander applications by using ARCore in mixed reality. At the end of the book, you’ll see how to implement motion tracking and environment learning, create animations and sounds, generate virtual characters, and simulate them on your screen.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Getting Started

Welcome to the world of immersive computing and augmented reality with Google ARCore. In this book, we will start with the basics. First, we will cover the basics of augmented reality (AR) on some important core concepts. From there, we will cover the installation and basics of the three development platforms (Android, web, and Unity) that we will use throughout the book. Next, we will take a more in-depth look at the technical challenges faced by AR developers, including various solutions techniques and for solving them. In the final chapters of the book, we will expand on those skills by developing three example AR and mixed reality (MR) apps, where we will build a Machine Learning object recognizer, an AR Designer app, and an app that transitions from AR to MR.

Note

We decided to omitthe Unreal platform from this book, not because it is an inferior platform, but quite the opposite. Unreal is a proven and cutting-edge game engine that is well suited for experienced graphic and game developers. However, Unreal and Unity are essentially on par for development features. Therefore, it made more sense to focus on Unity, which is far better suited for learning game and graphic development.

In this chapter, we will begin by quickly covering the fundamental concepts of immersive computing and augmented reality. Then, we will look at the core problems ARCore is designed to address (motion tracking, environmental understanding, and light estimation). Here's a quick look at the topics we will cover in this chapter:

  • Immersive computing
  • ARCore and AR
    • Motion tracking
    • Environmental understanding
    • Light estimation
  • The road ahead

Note

This book was written with a beta version of ARCore. If you find something different or something that needs to be changed, contact Packt with your errata.