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

Summary


In this chapter, we built a science project, a lot like I did when I was 8 years old; however, instead of wires and styrofoam balls, we made our solar system for augmented reality. Here, virtual objects interact with the real world using special cards we made with coded markers, one for each planet view. This idea could be extended, instead of cards, to pages in a book or labels on products.

Our first step was to make the earth, using an equirectangular texture of the earth's surface to build the material mapped to a sphere. Then, we added a second texture for the night side of the globe. Similarly, we built all the nine planets, the moon, and the sun. Each body was scaled and rotated accurately based on NASA data, but we compressed space and time for distance and orbits in some cases. The sun provides the light source.

We also learned to program in C# for Unity, writing short scripts to spin and orbit the planets, move the center viewpoint, and change the time scale in response to...