Book Image

Learn ARCore - Fundamentals of Google ARCore

Book Image

Learn ARCore - Fundamentals of Google ARCore

Overview of this book

Are you a mobile developer or web developer who wants to create immersive and cool Augmented Reality apps with the latest Google ARCore platform? If so, this book will help you jump right into developing with ARCore and will help you create a step by step AR app easily. This book will teach you how to implement the core features of ARCore starting from the fundamentals of 3D rendering to more advanced concepts such as lighting, shaders, Machine Learning, and others. We’ll begin with the basics of building a project on three platforms: web, Android, and Unity. Next, we’ll go through the ARCore concepts of motion tracking, environmental understanding, and light estimation. For each core concept, you’ll work on a practical project to use and extend the ARCore feature, from learning the basics of 3D rendering and lighting to exploring more advanced concepts. You’ll write custom shaders to light virtual objects in AR, then build a neural network to recognize the environment and explore even grander applications by using ARCore in mixed reality. At the end of the book, you’ll see how to implement motion tracking and environment learning, create animations and sounds, generate virtual characters, and simulate them on your screen.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Summary


For this chapter, we diverted away from AR a little and explored mixing augmented and mixed reality. We discovered that we can easily experience mixed reality apps with a simple device called a HoloKit or other cheap headset. ARCore tracks the user well and is a great fit for adding the MR experience. Who knows, in the future when everyone is wearing MR glasses, will we even distinguish AR and MR as different? We then set up the HoloKit template app and went to work building a quick MR demo. After that, we expanded on our demo by adding in WRLD. WRLD, as we learned, is a fun and easy-to-use API that can quickly give us some large-scale impressive 3D scenery that is representative of the user's area. From there, we developed a number of scenes for all the users to move a map touch interface to a full mixed-reality view of the map, where we were able to obtain the user's geographic coordinates from their device's GPS and put them at the same position in WRLD. Finally, we looked to...