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

Starting a new, basic AR scene

In this section, we'll create a scene very similar to SimpleAR (actually, more like the Samples scene named InputSystem_PlaceOnPlane) but we will start with a new empty scene. We'll add AR Session and AR Session Origin objects provided by AR Foundation to the scene hierarchy, and then add trackable feature managers for planes and point clouds. In the subsequent sections of this chapter, we'll set up an Input System action controller, write a C# script to handle any user interaction, and create a prefab 3D graphic to place in the scene.

So, start the new scene by performing the following steps:

  1. Create a new scene by going to File | New Scene.
  2. If prompted, choose the Basic (Built-in) template. Then, click Create.

    Unity allows you to use a Scene template when creating a new scene. The one named Basic (Built-in) is comparable to the default new scene in previous versions of Unity.

  3. Delete Main Camera from the Hierarchy window...