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

Chapter 6: Gallery: Building an AR App

In this chapter, we will begin building a full Augmented Reality (AR) app, an AR art gallery that lets you hang virtual framed photos on your real-world walls.

First, we'll define the goals of the project and discuss the importance of project planning and user experience (UX) design. When the user presses the Add button in the main menu, they'll see a Select Image menu. When they pick one, they'll be prompted to place a framed copy of the image on their real-world wall.

To implement the project, we will start with the AR user framework scene template that we created earlier in this book. We'll build a Select Image UI panel and interaction mode, and define the image data used by the app.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Specifying a new project and UX design
  • Using data structures and arrays, and passing data between objects
  • Creating a detailed UI menu panel with a grid of buttons...