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

Specifying the Art Gallery project UX

An important step before beginning any new project is to do some design and specifications ahead of time. This often entails writing it down in a document. For games, this may be referred to as the Game Design Document (GDD). For applications, it may be a Software Design Document (SDD). Whatever you call it, the purpose is to put into writing a blueprint of the project before development begins. A thorough design document for a Unity AR project might include details such as the following:

  • Project overview: Summarize the concept and purpose of the project, identify the primary audience, and perhaps include some background on why the project exists and how and why it will be successful.
  • Use cases: Identify the real-life problems the product will solve. It's often effective to define separate user personas (with real or fictitious names) representing types of users of the application, their main goals, and how they'll use the...