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 controller

It will be convenient to have a script with a small API that makes it easy to switch between UI panels. For the controller scripts in our framework, I've decided to define them as singletons.

A singleton is a software design pattern that ensures there is only a single instance of a script object at runtime. Then, the object's instance can be more easily referenced, using a static reference to Instance in the class definition. Learn more at https://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Singleton.

Then, we'll write a UIController script that controls the visibility of your UI panels. Lastly, we'll implement some code to fade in and out for a more pleasing user experience when we hide and show the panels.

Creating a Singleton class script

We'll begin by writing a Singleton class to use (or, if you already have a favorite, feel free to use that Singleton class definition instead). You can find some singleton implementations available...