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

Building the app's Main-mode

As you now know, AR Tracked Image Manager (on the AR Session Origin game object) performs 2D image tracking. But so far, we've being using the AR Tracked Image Manager incorrectly! We populated its Tracked Image Prefab property with our Earth Prefab. That's a no-no. According to the Unity documentation, "ARTrackedImageManager has a "Tracked Image Prefab" field; however, this is not intended for content" (https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/[email protected]/manual/tracked-image-manager.html). Currently, when any reference image is recognized, the Earth Prefab will always be instantiated.

Rather, when the app is in Main-mode, we should determine which planet card image is being tracked and instantiate the corresponding planet prefab for that card. So far, we only have one planet, Earth, in the image reference library. However, later in this chapter, we'll expand the project for all the planets. We can...