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

Collecting image data

In Unity, images can be imported for use in a variety of purposes. Textures are images that can be used for texturing the materials for rendering the surface of 3D objects. The UI uses images as sprites for button and panel graphics. For our framed photos, we're going to use images as… images.

The most basic approach to using images in your application is to import them into your Assets folder and reference them as Unity textures. A more advanced solution would be to dynamically find and load them at runtime. In this chapter, we'll use the former technique and build the list of images into the application. Let's start by importing the photos you want to use.

Importing photos to use

Go ahead and choose some images for your gallery from your favorites. Or you can use the images included with the files in this book's GitHub repository, containing a collection of freely usable nature photos found on Unsplash.com (https://unsplash...