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

Building for mobile AR with Vuforia


We've shown how to build the project for Microsoft HoloLens wearable AR devices and mobile iOS devices that support ARKit. But this is a limited market, as there are many more mobile devices that run Android, as well as Apple devices that do not support ARKit. In this section, we will adapt the project for mobile devices using the Vuforia toolkit SDK. Unfortunately, these devices are not capable of supporting spatial maps to anchor our AR graphics. Instead, we will use image targets.

A traditional approach used for more than two decades is to print marker images and tape them to the walls. Vuforia and AR Toolkit support the ability to recognize multiple targets concurrently. That is the approach we will take now.

If you have been following along and have already built the HoloLens or ARKit version of the project, we strongly suggest you save your work and copy the entire project directory tree for the Vuforia version. There are incompatibilities between...