What this book covers
Chapter 1, Setting Up for AR Development, after briefly defining AR, gets you set up for AR development, installing the Unity 3D game engine and the AR Foundation toolkit, and ensuring your system is ready to develop for Android (ARCore) and/or iOS (ARKit) mobile devices.
Chapter 2, Your First AR Scene, jumps right into building and running AR scenes, starting with examples provided in the AR Foundation samples project from Unity, and then moving on to building your own simple scene from scratch, learning about ARSession components, prefabs, and a little bit of C# coding too.
Chapter 3, Improving the Developer Workflow, teaches you about troubleshooting, debugging, remote testing, and Unity MARS, which can make your development workflow more efficient.
Chapter 4, Creating an AR User Framework, sees you develop a framework for building AR applications that manages user interaction modes, user interface panels, and AR onboarding graphics, which we will save as a template for reuse in other projects in this book.
Chapter 5, Using the AR User Framework, is where you will build a simple AR place-on-plane application using the AR user framework created in the previous chapter, including a main menu and a PlaceObject mode and UI. This chapter also discusses some advanced issues, such as making AR optional, determining device support, and adding localization to your projects.
Chapter 6, Gallery: Building an AR App, is part one of a two-chapter project. Here, you will develop a picture gallery application that lets you hang virtual framed photos on your real-world walls. In the process, you will learn about UX design, managing data and objects, menu buttons, and prefabs.
Chapter 7, Gallery: Editing Virtual Objects, is the second part of the Gallery project, where you will learn to implement interactions with virtual objects in your AR scene, including selecting and highlighting, moving, resizing, deleting, collision detection, and changing the photo in your picture frame.
Chapter 8, Planets: Tracking Images, shows you how to build an educational AR app that uses image tracking of Solar System "planet cards" that instantiates virtual planets hovering and spinning above your table.
Chapter 8, Selfies: Making Funny Faces, is where you will learn to use the front-facing camera of your device to make fun and entertaining face filters, including 3D heads, face masks (with choice of material textures), and accessories such as sunglasses and mustaches. It also covers advanced features specific to ARCore and ARKit that may not be generally supported by AR Foundation itself.