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

Accessing the camera in Android


To start with, we will create a simple camera activity to get to know the principles of camera access in Android. While there are convenient Android applications that provide quick means for snapping a picture or recording a video through Android intents, we will get our hands dirty and use the Android camera API to get a customized camera access for our first application.

We will guide you, step-by-step, in creating your first app showing a live camera preview. This will include:

  • Creating an Eclipse project

  • Requesting relevant permissions in the Android Manifest file

  • Creating SurfaceView to be able to capture the preview frames of the camera

  • Creating an activity that displays the camera preview frames

  • Setting camera parameters

Tip

Downloading the example code

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