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

Installing ARCore


Of course, in order to work with or build any ARCore applications, we will need to install the SDK for our chosen platform. Follow the given instructions to install the ARCore SDK:

Note

We will use Git to pull down the code we need directly from the source. You can learn more about Git and how to install it on your platform at https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git or use Google to search: getting started installing Git. Ensure that when you install on Windows, you select the defaults and let the installer set the PATH environment variables.

  1. Open Command Prompt or Windows shell and navigate to the Android (C:\Android on Windows) installation folder.
  2. Enter the following command:
git clone https://github.com/google-ar/arcore-android-sdk.git
  1. This will download and install the ARCore SDK into a new folder called arcore-android-sdk, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Command window showing the installation of ARCore

  1. Ensure that you leave the command window...