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

Creating and instantiating a virtual Earth prefab

In this section, we will create prefab game objects for each of the planets. Since each of the planets has similar behaviors (for example, they rotate), we'll first create a generic Planet Prefab, and then make each specific planet a variant of that one. In Unity, prefab variants allow you to define a set of predefined variations of prefabs, such as our planet one (see https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/PrefabVariants.html). We'll write a Planet script that animates the planet's rotation and handles other behavior. Each planet will have its own "skin" defined by a material, along with a base texture map, which we downloaded earlier from the web.

In this section, we'll create a generic Planet Prefab object, create an Earth Prefab as a variant, add planet metadata by writing a Planet component script, and implement a planet rotation animation.

Creating the generic Planet Prefab

The Planet Prefab contains...