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

Technical requirements

First, you need a PC or Mac that's capable of running Unity. The minimum requirements are not difficult; almost any PC or Mac today will be sufficient (see https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/system-requirements.html).

If you are developing for iOS, you will need a Mac running OSX with the current version of XCode installed, and an Apple developer account. If you are developing for Android, you can use either a Windows PC or Mac. We will discuss this further throughout this chapter.

It is not practical to develop for AR without a device capable of running your application. For this chapter (and this book as a whole), you will need either an iOS device that supports Apple ARKit (search the web as Apple does not appear to publish a list; for example, https://ioshacker.com/iphone/arkit-compatibility-list-iphone-ipad-ipod-touch) or an Android device that supports ARCore (https://developers.google.com/ar/discover/supported-devices).

Because this chapter is largely about installing tools and packages according to your requirements, please work through the topics in this chapter for additional technical requirements and to learn how to install them. The GitHub repository for this book can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Augmented-Reality-with-Unity-AR-Foundation.