Book Image

Augmented Reality with Unity AR Foundation

By : Jonathan Linowes
2 (1)
Book Image

Augmented Reality with Unity AR Foundation

2 (1)
By: Jonathan Linowes

Overview of this book

Augmented reality applications allow people to interact meaningfully with the real world through digitally enhanced content. The book starts by helping you set up for AR development, installing the Unity 3D game engine, required packages, and other tools to develop for Android (ARCore) and/or iOS (ARKit) mobile devices. Then we jump right into the building and running AR scenes, learning about AR Foundation components, other Unity features, C# coding, troubleshooting, and testing. We create a framework for building AR applications that manages user interaction modes, user interface panels, and AR onboarding graphics that you will save as a template for reuse in other projects in this book. Using this framework, you will build multiple projects, starting with a virtual photo gallery that lets you place your favorite framed photos on your real-world walls, and interactively edit these virtual objects. Other projects include an educational image tracking app for exploring the solar system, and a fun selfie app to put masks and accessories on your face. The book provides practical advice and best practices that will have you up and running quickly. By the end of this AR book, you will be able to build your own AR applications, engaging your users in new and innovative ways.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Getting Started with Augmented Reality
5
Section 2 – A Reusable AR User Framework
8
Section 3 – Building More AR Projects

Chapter 8: Planets: Tracking Images

In this chapter, we will be using augmented reality for data visualization and education. We're going to build a project where users can learn about the planets in our Solar System. Suppose you have a children's science book on the Solar System with a companion mobile app. On the page about planet Earth, for example, the reader can point their mobile device at the picture on the page and a 3D rendering of the Earth will pop out of the page.

The AR mechanism we'll be using is known as image tracking. With image tracking, you prepare a reference library of images that may be recognized and tracked in the real world at runtime. When the user's device's camera detects one of these images, a virtual object can be instantiated at the image location.

I have provided you with "planet cards," which have pictures and unique markers on them for each planet that I created from free resources available on the web, for...