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

A tracking service with Firebase


Now, being able to track a user'smotion is all well and good, but what if we wanted to track a user across applications or even multiple users at the same time? This will require us to write a server, set up a database, make a schema, and so on, which is certainly not an easy task and cannot be easily explained in just a chapter. However, what if there was an easier way? Well, there is, and again, Google comes to our rescue with Firebase.

Firebase is an excellent collection of app tools and storage services that are dead simple to use and cross-platform. We will use Firebase database, a real-time database service, to track our user's position. Open up a web browser and follow the given steps:

  1. Browse to firebase.google.com.
  2. Click on the GET STARTED button.
  3. Log in with your Google (Gmail) account. If you don't have one, yes, you will need to create one to continue.
  4. Click on the Add project button.
  5. Name your project ARCore and select your own Country/Region, as shown...