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

Chapter 9. Blending Light for Architectural Design

This is the first of two chapters where we will build real-world AR apps that you can learn from and show off to friends and family. Unlike in the previous chapters, this time we will build our AR app from nothing. That way, we can learn the specific details needed for incorporating ARCore into a Unity project. We have a lot to cover in this chapter, so let's get started. Listed here is a quick summary of the main topics we will cover:

  • Setting up the project
  • Placing content
  • Building the UI
  • Interacting with the virtual
  • Lighting and shadows

The premise for our app will be an AR tool for architecture and design. The designing apps are very popular in AR right now and fit very well with the toolkit ARCore provides.

Note

Being able to virtually place objects in or over a real-world object and instantly see how it looks has a tremendous benefit to designers and architects. Now a designer using an AR app can instantly transform a space with their vision...