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

Hanging a virtual photo on your wall

For this project, the app scans the environment for vertical planes. When the user wants to hang a picture on the wall, we'll show a UI panel that instructs the user to tap to place the object, using an animated graphic. Once the user taps the screen, the AddPicture mode instantiates a FramedPhoto prefab, so it appears to hang on the wall, upright and flush against the wall plane. Many of these steps are similar to what we did in Chapter 5, Using the AR User Framework, so I'll offer a little less explanation here. We'll start with a similar script and then enhance it.

Detecting vertical planes

Given the AR Session Origin already has an AR Plane Manager component (provided in the default ARFramework template), use the following steps to set up the scene to scan for vertical planes (instead of horizontal ones):

  1. In the Hierarchy window, select the AR Session Origin object.
  2. In its Inspector window, set the AR Plane Manager...