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

Setting up the project


We will use the sample project as a template for creating a new project. At the time of writing, doing an ARCore asset import with the beta version still requires considerable project setup. Ideally, we would like to create a project from scratch, but we will do the next best thing. The next best thing will be to clone the project from GitHub into a new folder of our choice. You can start by opening up Command Prompt and following these steps:

  1. Create a new folder off your root or working folder and download the ARCore template by executing the following commands:
mkdir ARCore
cd ARCore
git clone https://github.com/google-ar/arcore-unity-sdk.git ARCoreDesign
  1. This will create a new folder. Switch to it and download the project template from GitHub.
  2. Open up Unity to the project dialog and click on Open.
  3. Use the folder dialog to find and select the ARCoreDesign folder we just downloaded the code to, as shown in the following excerpt:

Opening the ARCoreDesign project

  1. Wait for...