Book Image

Augmented Reality for Developers

By : Jonathan Linowes, Krystian Babilinski
Book Image

Augmented Reality for Developers

By: Jonathan Linowes, Krystian Babilinski

Overview of this book

Augmented Reality brings with it a set of challenges that are unseen and unheard of for traditional web and mobile developers. This book is your gateway to Augmented Reality development—not a theoretical showpiece for your bookshelf, but a handbook you will keep by your desk while coding and architecting your first AR app and for years to come. The book opens with an introduction to Augmented Reality, including markets, technologies, and development tools. You will begin by setting up your development machine for Android, iOS, and Windows development, learning the basics of using Unity and the Vuforia AR platform as well as the open source ARToolKit and Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit. You will also receive an introduction to Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore! You will then focus on building AR applications, exploring a variety of recognition targeting methods. You will go through multiple complete projects illustrating key market sectors including business marketing, education, industrial training, and gaming. By the end of the book, you will have gained the necessary knowledge to make quality content appropriate for a range of AR devices, platforms, and intended uses.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

A quick introduction to Unity C# programming


Unity does a lot of things: it manages objects, renders them, animates them, calculates physics, and more. Unity itself is a program. The internal Unity code is accessible by you, the game developer, through the Unity point-and-click Editor interface we've already been using. Within the Unity Editor, scripts are manifested as configurable components. But, it's also more directly accessible by you through the Unity scripting API.

API, or application programming interface, simply refers to published software functions that you can access from your own scripts. Unity's API is very rich and nicely designed. That's one reason people have written amazing plugin add-ons for Unity.

There are many programming languages available. Unity has chosen to support the C# language from Microsoft. Computer languages have a specific syntax that must be obeyed or the computer will not understand your script. In Unity, script errors (and warnings) appear in the Console...