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, after a quick introduction to augmented reality, you immediately got started on your road to developing your own AR projects. You installed Unity via Unity Hub and learned the importance of tracking the different versions of Unity, as well as its projects and packages. You got a brief tour of using the Unity Editor, including some key concepts that are fundamental to 3D and AR.

You then set up your project and system software for AR development, including installing an XR plugin, the AR Foundation package, tools for Android or Xcode, and other items necessary to get things set up. Lastly, we created a minimal AR scene (including a quick point cloud prefab using a particle system component) and built the scene to verify it builds and runs on your target device.

Setting up your machine may be intricate and painful, but it's your entry ticket to Unity development, and everyone has to do it. If you got through this chapter with everything running, you are a hero!

In the next chapter, we'll begin to take a closer look at AR development using Unity and AR Foundation by creating a new AR scene, step by step, explaining each component as we go.