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

Summary


With that, we have completed our simple example of a design app. We were able to complete all the major technical items we wanted to accomplish. We started with setting up a new Unity project using the ARCore example as a template. This saved us some time in what would have otherwise become a very long chapter. Next, we learned how to import new models from sites such as TurboSquid and how to set them up as prefabs for later use. Then, we built a simple UI to allow us to clear the tracking planes from the view and clear any models. After that, we added the ability for a user to select and move an object in the AR scene. This required us to enhance one of the ARCore example shaders and heavily modify the SceneController script. Finally, we tackled shadows by turning on lights and adding a transparent shadow receiver to our object prefab.

ARCore is well suited for the next wave of HoloLens or mixed reality low-cost headsets. In the next chapter, we take a bit of a break from AR and...