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

Who this book is for

If you want to develop your own AR applications, I recommend using Unity with AR Foundation as it is one of the most powerful and flexible platforms. Developers interested in creating AR projects can use this book to accelerate their progress on the learning curve and gain experience through a variety of fun and interesting projects. This book complements Unity's own documentation and other resources and provides practical advice and best practices that will have you up and running and productive quickly.

You do not need to be a Unity expert to use this book, but some familiarity will help you get started more quickly. If you are a beginner, I recommend you first run through one or two introductory tutorials found on Unity Learn (https://learn.unity.com/). It may also be helpful to have some experience developing for mobile devices (iOS and/or Android).

That said, I start from the very beginning, walking you along your learning curve slowly at first and then faster as you gain experience. And I provide plenty of links to external resources if you want to learn more and explore specific topics in more depth. Experienced readers can push past the instructions and explanations they already know.