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 the face pose with 3D heads

The AR Face Assets package from Unity that we imported at the top of this chapter contains a couple of 3D head models we can use in our project. We'll create prefabs of each model and try them separately in the AR Face Manager Face Prefab property. In the next section, we'll create a menu so that the user can pick which head to view at runtime.

Making a Mr. Plastic Head prefab

The first head prefab will use the Plasticscene Head assets given in the Unity AR Face Assets package, and found in the Assets/AR face Assets/3D Head/Plasticene Head/ folder. This folder contains an FBX model named Plasto_Head and a material named PlasiceneHead (the typo is theirs). The model will require some transform adjustments before it can be used as a face prefab. To create a prefab for this model, use the following steps:

  1. In the Project window, right-click in your Prefabs/ folder (create one first if necessary) and choose Create | Prefab. Rename...