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

Tracking reference images

Our starter scene includes an AR Session Origin with components for Player Input and AR Raycast Manager. It also has a component we do not need in this project, for detecting and tracking planes, which we'll replace with AR Tracked Image Manager instead. Documentation on AR Tracked Image Manager can be found at https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/[email protected]/manual/tracked-image-manager.html. Then, we'll create an image reference library for our planet card images.

Adding AR Tracked Image Manager

To configure the AR Session to track images, perform the following steps:

  1. In the Hierarchy window, select the AR Session Origin game object.
  2. In the Inspector window, use the 3-dot context menu (or right-click) on AR Plane Manager and select Remove Component.
  3. Using the Add Component button, search for AR and add an AR Tracked Image Manager component.

You'll notice that there is a Serialized Library slot on...