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

Mixed reality and HoloKit


HoloKit was created by Botau Hu, a brilliant new tech innovator that will surely experience great success in the industry. It's a wearable device that projects your mobile devices screen into a 3D holographic projection. This holographic projection is then overlaid onto the user's view, thus allowing them to experience a more immersive environment that often teeters on the edge of VR. The following is an illustration of what a HoloKit looks like fully assembled:

Fully assembled HoloKit

As you can see from the diagram, the device is quite similar in construction to that of Google Cardboard. Cardboard was Google's way of democratizing VR to the masses, and it worked. If you are unable to quickly get a HoloKit, you can also use a modified Google Cardboard. Just cut a slot in the cardboard for the device's camera and ensure not to move around too much.

One of the first things you will note about most mixed reality headsets is the ability of the user to see through their...