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 6. Understanding the Environment

Augmented reality applications are all about enhancing or augmenting the user's reality. In order to do this, we as AR app developers need a set of tools capable of understanding the user's environment. As we saw in the last chapter, ARCore uses visual-inertial odometry (VIO) to identify objects and features in the environment, which it can then use to obtain a pose of the device and track motion. However, this technology can also help us identify objects and their pose using the same toolkit. In this chapter, we will explore how we can use the ARCore API to better understand the user's environment. Here's a quick overview of the main topics we will cover in this chapter:

  • Tracking the point cloud
  • Meshing and the environment
  • Interacting with the environment
  • Drawing with OpenGL ES
  • Shader programming

If you have not downloaded the source code from GitHub, you will need to do so for this chapter. Of course, you will also need to have completed the setup and...