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

Introduction to computer vision-based tracking and VuforiaTM


So far, you have used the camera of the mobile phone exclusively for rendering the view of the real world as the background for your models. Computer vision-based AR goes a step further and processes each image frame to look for familiar patterns (or image features) in the camera image.

In a typical computer vision-based AR application, planar objects such as frame markers or natural feature tracking targets are used to position the camera in a local coordinate system (see Chapter 3, Superimposing the World, Figure showing the three most common coordinate systems). This is in contrast to the global coordinate system (the earth) used in sensor-based AR but allows for more precise and stable overlay of virtual content in this local coordinate frame. Similar to before, obtaining the tracking information allows the updating of information about the virtual camera in our 3D graphics rendering engine and automatically provides us with...