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 got a chance to use the AR user framework we developed in the previous Chapter 4, Creating an AR User Framework, in a simple AR Place Object Demo project. We created a new scene using the ARFramework scene template that implements a state machine mechanism for managing user interaction modes. It handles user interaction with a controller-view design pattern, separating the control scripts from the UI graphics.

By default, the scene includes the AR Session and AR Session Origin components required by AR Foundation. The scene is set up with a Canvas UI containing separate panels that will be displayed for each interaction mode. It also includes an Interaction Controller that references separate mode objects, one for each interaction mode.

The modes (and corresponding UI) given with the template are Startup, Scan, Main, and NonAR. An app using this framework first starts in Startup-mode while the AR Session is initializing. Then it goes into Scan-mode...