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

Understanding AR image tracking

Before we start building our project, let's take a moment to learn how AR image tracking works. In this section, I'll introduce some of the basic principles behind image recognition and tracking, and what makes some images better than others for this purpose.

As we know, the principles behind augmented reality involve using compute mechanisms to recognize features in the real world, determine their position and orientation in a 3D space, instantiate virtual objects relative to and anchored within this 3D space, and track the user as they move within this space. Modern devices can accomplish this using their video cameras and other sensors built into the device to performing real-time spatial mapping of the environment. A different approach is for the device to track predetermined images. That is what we will use for the project in this chapter.

Augmented reality technology was born in the 1990s, where QR code-like marker images were used...