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

Getting content for your AR browser – the Google Places API


After knowing how to obtain your GPS position and the orientation of the phone, you are now ready to integrate great content into the live view of the camera. Would it not be cool to physically explore points of interests, such as landmarks and shops around you? We will now show you how to integrate popular location-based services such as the Google Places API to achieve exactly this. For a successful integration into your application, you will need to perform the following steps:

  • Query for point of interests (POIs) around your current location

  • Parse the results and extract information belonging to the POIs

  • Visualize the information in your AR view

Before we start, you have to make sure that you have a valid API key for your application. For that you also need a Google account. You can obtain it by logging in with your Google account under https://code.google.com/apis/console.

For testing your application you can either use the default...