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 8. Recognizing the Environment

Throughout this book, we have looked at the numerous ways of how our device, with the help of ARCore, can track the user, understand the user's world, and render an alternate reality. ARCore uses the device's sensors and camera as inputs to constantly update what it perceives as the user's real world. However, what if we wanted to do more for the user; perhaps identify a certain object, sign, or landmark? That would require a much more advanced set of tools. Even just 5 years ago, this would seem like an incredibly daunting task. With the advent of OpenAI, thanks to Mr. Musk, many other companies have started to open source and make their tools available. This has led to phenomenal explosive growth in these technologies, colloquially referred to as Machine Learning (ML), and broadened their accessibility to everyone. Fortunately, for those interested in developing AR apps, this is a good thing. We want all the help we can get when it comes to recognizing...