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

Installing Unity and ARCore


Installing the Unity editor is relatively straightforward. However, the version of Unity we will be using may still be in beta. Therefore, it is important that you pay special attention to the following instructions when installing Unity:

  1. Navigate a web browser to https://unity3d.com/unity/beta.

Note

At the time of writing, we will use the most recent beta version of Unity since ARCore is also still in beta preview. Be sure to note the version you are downloading and installing. This will help in the event you have issues working with ARCore. 

  1. Click on the Download installer button. This will download UnityDownloadAssistant.
  2. Launch UnityDownloadAssistant.
  3. Click on Next and then agree to the Terms of Service. Click on Next again.
  4. Select the components, as shown:

Selecting the components to install

  1. Install Unity in a folder that identifies the version, as follows:

Setting the Unity installation path

  1. Click on Next to download and install Unity. This can take a while, so get...