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

Configuring the user interaction modes and UI

The scene template, ARFramework, where we started provides a simple framework for enabling user interaction modes and displaying the corresponding UI panels for a mode. This project will start in Startup-mode while the AR Session is initializing so that we can verify that the device supports AR. Then, it will transition to Scan-mode, where it will try to find one of the reference images. Once found, it will transition to Main-mode, where we can support additional user interactions with the app's content.

Scanning for reference images

In Scan-mode, we'll display an instructional graphic prompting the user to point the camera at a planet card with a planet and marker image. Perform the following steps to configure this:

  1. In the Hierarchy window, unfold the UI Canvas game object and unfold its child Scan UI. Select the child Animated Prompt object.
  2. In the Inspector window set Animated Prompt | Instruction to Find...