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 a face maker app that handles face tracking with the forward-facing (user-facing) camera on a mobile device. You learned that the AR Face Manager component takes a Face Prefab to instantiate when a face is tracked. You first used that to visualize specific AR Face prefabs but then created a generic Changeable Face Prefab with a ChangeableFace script that we could update from the FaceMainMode script.

You used this architecture to explore several ways of rendering tracked faces. First, you used the face pose to render an instantiated 3D head model (MrPlasticHead and MrFacetHead). Next, you used this technique to add accessories to the face, including a TopHat and Sunglasses. Then, you added an AR Face Mesh Visualizer to generate a face mesh dynamically at runtime, and then made several materials that can be applied to the mesh to make a wide variety of face masks. If you're on ARCore, you also implemented face region stickers using sprite images...