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

Creating a prefab for placing

The prefab object we've been placing on the planes in this chapter is the one named AR Placed Cube, which we imported from the AR Foundation Samples project. Let's find a different, more interesting, model to use instead. In the process, we'll learn a bit more about GameObjects, Transforms, and prefabs.

Understanding GameObjects and Transforms

I think a good place to start is by taking a closer look at the AR Placed Cube prefab we've been using. Let's open it in the Editor by performing the following steps:

  1. In the Project window, navigate to the ARF-samples/Prefabs/ folder.
  2. Double-click the AR Placed Cube prefab.

We are now editing the prefab, as shown in the following screenshot (I have rearranged my windows differently from the default layout):

Figure 2.10 – Editing the AR Placed Cube prefab

The Scene window now shows the isolated prefab object, and the Hierarchy window...