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

Summary

In this chapter, we developed a framework for building AR applications and saved it as a template we can use for projects in this book. The framework provides a state-machine structure for implementing modes and identifying the conditions when to transition to a different mode. The framework also offers a controller-view design pattern where, when a mode is active, its corresponding UI is visible, keeping the mode control objects separate from the UI view objects.

For the framework template, we implemented four modes: Startup mode, Scan mode, Main mode, and NonAR mode, along with four UI panels: Startup UI, Scan UI, Main UI, and NonAR UI. Scan mode uses the onboarding UX assets from the AR Foundation Demos project to prompt the user to scan for trackable features and report problems with detection and the AR session.

In the next chapter, I will demonstrate the use of this framework with a simple demo project and then build upon the framework more extensively in subsequent...