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

Exploring the code


Unlike Android, we were able to easily modify our Unity app right in the editor without writing code. In fact, given the right Unity extensions, you can make a working game in Unity without any code. However, for us, we want to get into the nitty-gritty details of ARCore, and that will require writing some code. Jump back to the Unity editor, and let's look at how we can modify some code by implementing the following exercise:

  1. From the Hierarchy window, select the ExampleController object. This will pull up the object in the Inspector window.
  2. Select the Gear icon beside Hello AR Controller (Script) and from the context menu, select Edit Script, as in the following excerpt:

Editing a script in Unity

  1. This will open your script editor and load the script, by default, MonoDevelop.

Note

Unity supports a number of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for writing C# scripts. Some popular options are Visual Studio 2015-2017 (Windows), VS Code (All), JetBrains Rider (Mac), and...