Book Image

Augmented Reality for Developers

By : Jonathan Linowes, Krystian Babilinski
Book Image

Augmented Reality for Developers

By: Jonathan Linowes, Krystian Babilinski

Overview of this book

Augmented Reality brings with it a set of challenges that are unseen and unheard of for traditional web and mobile developers. This book is your gateway to Augmented Reality development—not a theoretical showpiece for your bookshelf, but a handbook you will keep by your desk while coding and architecting your first AR app and for years to come. The book opens with an introduction to Augmented Reality, including markets, technologies, and development tools. You will begin by setting up your development machine for Android, iOS, and Windows development, learning the basics of using Unity and the Vuforia AR platform as well as the open source ARToolKit and Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit. You will also receive an introduction to Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore! You will then focus on building AR applications, exploring a variety of recognition targeting methods. You will go through multiple complete projects illustrating key market sectors including business marketing, education, industrial training, and gaming. By the end of the book, you will have gained the necessary knowledge to make quality content appropriate for a range of AR devices, platforms, and intended uses.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Installing Unity


All of the projects in this book will be built using the Unity 3D game engine. Unity is a powerful, cross-platform 3D environment with a user-friendly development editor. It consists of an amalgamation of various modules for managing and rendering 3D objects, lighting, physics, animations, audio, and more. It is also widely used for developing 2D games; however, the only 2D-specific features we will use in a project are the screen-space user interface (UI). Each of the Unity modules has a programmer interface, or API, with a rich set of classes and functions, so the entire system can be accessed through scripts written in the C# programming language.

Unity provides a range of subscription and licensing options. For more details, see https://store.unity.com/. The basic Personal version is free to download and use, and is great for AR development. In fact, the Personal version has all the same features of the paid versions! You need to go to a paid version only if your product...