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 the UI canvas and panels

The main screen space UI canvas will contain various user interface panels that may be displayed at various times throughout the application. Presently, we'll include the following UI panels.

  • The Startup UI panel with any initialization messages
  • The Scan UI panel, which prompts the user to scan for trackable features
  • The Main UI panel for the main mode that could display the main menu buttons
  • The NonAR UI panel, which could be shown when the device does not support Augmented Reality

Creating the screen space canvas

First, we need to create a Canvas to contain these panels. Follow these steps:

  1. From the main menu, select GameObject | UI | Canvas and rename the Canvas UI Canvas. We can leave the default Render Mode as Screen Space – Overlay. This will also add an Event System game object to the scene if one is not already present.
  2. By default, the new Canvas is in screen space, and this is what we want...