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 Main mode and menu

In this section, we will set up the main mode app to handle user interactions, including face filter selections from a main menu. To do this, we first need to create a changeable face prefab that can be told which facial features to display. We'll write a FaceMainMode script that displays the main UI panel and passes change requests from the user to the face object. Then, we'll make a main menu with a set of horizontally scrolling buttons that the user can tap to change face filters.

Creating a changeable face prefab

To create a face prefab that we can use for dynamically changing filters during runtime, we'll start with an empty game object with an AR Face component, and add a script for setting the contained prefab object. Use the following steps:

  1. In the Project window, right-click in your Prefabs/ folder and choose Create | Prefab. Rename it Changeable Face Prefab.
  2. Click Open Prefab to begin editing.
  3. With the...