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 created a real app that provides a step-by-step, how-to guide for changing a flat tire. We did not build Augmented Reality features into it yet, but we covered a lot of ground, including introducing some great features in Unity, powerful software design patterns, and practical procedures such as importing external data from a database. All very important stuff for developing Augmented Reality apps too.

First, we defined our project requirements to take an existing web-based instruction manual and convert it into a mobile app, with the intent of adding AR capability (in the next chapter). We also introduced a number of software design patterns that professional developers commonly use, not only in Unity applications, and then got a chance to use them ourselves throughout the chapter. These include model-view-controller (MVC), event listeners, and object inheritance.

For the implementation, we started by building the user interface (view) using Unity's UI system,...