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 scene template for new scenes

We can save this ARFramework scene we've been working on as a template to use for starting new scenes in this Unity project. To create a scene template, perform the following steps.

  1. With the ARFramework scene open, select File | Save As Scene Template.
  2. In the Save window, navigate to your Scenes/ folder, verify the template name (ARFramework.scenetemplate), and then press Save.
  3. Subsequently, when you want to start a new AR scene, use this template. By default, Unity will duplicate any dependencies within the scene into a separate folder. In our case, this is generally not what we want to do.

    To prevent cloning the scene dependencies when the template is used, click on this new scene template file in your Project Assets/ window.

  4. In its Inspector window, in the Dependencies panel, uncheck each of the assets you do not want to be cloned and want to be shared between your scenes. In our case, we do not want to clone any,...