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

Tracking the point cloud


As we discussed, motion tracking in ARCore is done by identifying and tracking recognizable features around the user. It then uses those points with the device's orientation and accelerometer sensors to keep its tracking updated. Without doing this, the ability to track accurately quickly falls apart. Additionally, we gain the benefit of now tracking multiple points that ARCore identifies as object points. Let's see an example of what these tracking points look like by starting up the sample ARCore Android app again. Follow the given steps to get started:

  1. Open Android Studio. If you haven't opened any other projects, then it should immediately load the Android ARCore sample project. If not, load the project in the Android/arcore-android-sdk/samples/java_arcore_hello_ar folder.
  2. Open the HelloArActivity.java file and scroll down to the OnDrawFrame method, as shown in the following excerpt:

Opening the HelloArActivity.java file in Android Studio

  1. OnDrawFrame is the render...