Book Image

Augmented Reality for Android Application Development

Book Image

Augmented Reality for Android Application Development

Overview of this book

Augmented Reality offers the magical effect of blending the physical world with the virtual world, which brings applications from your screen into your hands. AR redefines advertising and gaming, as well as education. It will soon become a technology that will have to be mastered as a necessity by mobile application developers. Augmented Reality for Android Application Development enables you to implement sensor-based and computer vision-based AR applications on Android devices. You will learn about the theoretical foundations and practical details of implemented AR applications, and you will be provided with hands-on examples that will enable you to quickly develop and deploy novel AR applications on your own. Augmented Reality for Android Application Development will help you learn the basics of developing mobile AR browsers, how to integrate and animate 3D objects easily with the JMonkeyEngine, how to unleash the power of computer vision-based AR using the Vuforia AR SDK, and will teach you about popular interaction metaphors. You will get comprehensive knowledge of how to implement a wide variety of AR apps using hands-on examples. This book will make you aware of how to use the AR engine, Android layout, and overlays, and how to use ARToolkit. Finally, you will be able to apply this knowledge to make a stunning AR application.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Augmented Reality for Android Application Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Augmented Reality Concepts and Tools
Index

Understanding the camera


Phone manufacturers are always competing to equip your smartphone with the most advanced camera sensor, packing it with more features, such as higher resolution, better contrast, faster video capture, new autofocus mode, and so on. The consequence is that the capabilities (features) of the mobile phone cameras can differ significantly between smartphone models or brands. Thankfully, the Google Android API provides a generic wrapper for the underlying camera hardware unifying the access for the developer: the Android camera API. For your development, an efficient access to the camera needs a clear understanding of the camera capabilities (parameters and functions) available through the API. Underestimating this aspect will result in slow-running applications or pixelated images, affecting the user experience of your application.

Camera characteristics

Cameras on smartphones nowadays share many characteristics with digital point-and-shoot cameras. They generally support...