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

Summary

In this chapter, you built an AR project that lets you visualize and learn about planets in our Solar System. The scene uses AR image detection and tracks the planet cards that you printed out from the PDF file provided with the files for this book. Each planet card image includes a distinct marker with unique details, high contrast edges, and asymmetric shapes, making them readily detectable and trackable by the AR system. You set up the AR Session to track images using the AR Trackable Image Manager component and built a Reference Image Library asset with the planet card images.

You then created a generic Planet Prefab with a Planet script that controls the rotation behavior and metadata for a planet. Then, you created separate prefab variants for each planet. You wrote a PlanetsMainMode script that instantiates the correct planet prefab when a specific planet card image is detected. This allows multiple tracked images and planets to be present in the scene. Then, you...