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

Installing Node.js


Unlike the other platforms, we don't need to install anything more on the device to use an AR web app. However, we do need a way to serve up our web application pages to a device. Typically, this is done with a web server, like IIS, Tomcat, Jetty, Node, or others. For our purpose, we just need a simple HTTP server to serve up static HTML content. Fortunately, Node provides a package just for running a simple HTTP server from a folder. In order to get this package, we first need to install Node. Follow the given steps to install Node:

  1. Download and install the Long Term Support (LTS) version of Node.js from Nodejs.org. Just follow the instructions on the page and installer. Ensure that you set the PATH when installing to Windows.

Note

Node.js is a lightweight, non-blocking, and event-driven JavaScript runtime built on top of Chrome's JavaScript runtime. It has become hugely popular due to its massive library of modules or packages. We are installing Node.js just to use a Node...