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 PlaceObject-mode with instructional UI

When the user picks an object from the main menu, the app will enable PlaceObject-mode. For this mode, we need a UI panel to prompt the user to tap the screen to place the object. Let's create the UI panel first.

Creating the PlaceObject UI panel

The PlaceObject UI panel should be similar to the Scan UI one, so we can duplicate and modify it using the following steps:

  1. In the Hierarchy window, unfold the UI Canvas.
  2. Right-click the Scan UI game object and select Duplicate. Rename the new object PlaceObject UI.
  3. Unfold PlaceObject UI and select its child Animated Prompt.
  4. In the Inspector, set the Animated Prompt | Instruction to Tap To Place. The resulting component is shown in the following screenshot:

    Figure 5.4 – Animated Prompt settings for the PlaceObject UI panel

  5. Now we add the panel to the UI Controller.

    In the Hierarchy, select the UI Canvas object.

  6. In the Inspector, at the bottom-right of...