Book Image

Augmented Reality Game Development

By : Micheal Lanham
Book Image

Augmented Reality Game Development

By: Micheal Lanham

Overview of this book

The heyday of location-based augmented reality games is upon us. They have been around for a few years, but the release of Pokémon Go was a gamechanger that catalyzed the market and led to a massive surge in demand. Now is the time for novice and experienced developers alike to turn their good ideas into augmented reality (AR) mobile games and meet this demand! If you are keen to develop virtual reality games with the latest Unity 5 toolkit, then this is the book for you. The genre of location-based AR games introduces a new platform and technical challenges, but this book will help simplify those challenges and show how to maximize your game audience. This book will take you on a journey through building a location-based AR game that addresses the core technical concepts: GIS fundamentals, mobile device GPS, mapping, map textures in Unity, mobile device camera, camera textures in Unity, accessing location-based services, and other useful Unity tips. The technical material also discusses what is necessary for further development to create a multiplayer version of the game. At the end, you will be presented with troubleshooting techniques in case you get into trouble and need a little help.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Augmented Reality Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Using JSON


JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and is a definition for a very lightweight format for transmitting data through object serialization. This means that the message we received from the Google Places API is actually a set of objects. All we need to do is properly parse these objects, and it will be a simple matter to understand the search results. Unity does actually have a built-in JSON library; but, at the time of writing this book, it could not parse the Google Places API response. Fortunately, there are plenty of resources available to parse JSON.

Since the Unity engine could not effectively parse the response, it was decided to use a library called TinyJson. TinyJson is another open source library pulled from GitHub, but parts had to be rewritten in order to support the iOS platform. However, a couple calls to the System.Linq namespace were left in. If you plan to run this code on an iOS device, make sure that your scripting backend is set to IL2CPP.

Note

As we mentioned...