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

Placing an object on a plane

We will now add the ability for the user to tap on a plane and place a 3D virtual object in the scene. There are several parts to implementing this:

  • Setting up a Place Object input action when the user taps the screen.
  • Writing a PlaceObjectOnPlane script that responds to the input action and places an object on the plane.
  • Determining which plane and where to place the object using AR Raycast Manager.
  • Importing a 3D model and making it a prefab for placing in this scene.

Let's begin by creating an input action for a screen tap.

Setting up a PlaceObject input action

We are going to use the Unity Input System package for user input. If the Input System is new to you, the steps in this section may seem complicated, but only because of its great versatility.

The Input System lets you define Actions that separate the logical meaning of the input from the physical means of the input. Using named actions is more meaningful...