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

Adding a main menu

The main menu UI resides under the Menu UI panel (under UI Canvas) in the scene hierarchy. We will add a menu panel with three buttons to let you add a cube, a sphere, and a virus. We'll create a menu sub-panel and arrange the menu buttons horizontally. Follow these steps:

  1. In the Hierarchy, unfold the UI Canvas, and unfold its child Main UI object.
  2. First, remove the temporary Main mode text element. Right-click the child Text object and select Delete.
  3. Right-click the Menu UI and select UI | Panel, then rename it Main Menu.
  4. On the Main Menu panel, use the Anchor Presets to set Bottom-Stretch, and use Shift + Alt + click Bottom-Stretch to make a bottom panel. Then set Rect Transform | Height to 175.
  5. I set my background Image | Color to opaque white with Alpha: 255.
  6. Select Add Component, search layout, then select | Horizontal Layout Group.
  7. On the Horizontal Layout Group component check the Control Child Size | Width and Height checkboxes...