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

Building and running from Unity


In the previous chapter, we saw how to create a new project in Unity; import an AR SDK package, such as Vuforia or ARToolkit, into the project; and build a scene with a camera, target image recognition, and virtual object (cube). To summarize, a Unity AR-ready scene, such as the demo scene we built in the previous chapter, should contain the following:

  • A camera with SDK-specific AR components attached
  • A game object representing an image target, with an SDK-specific component identifying the image to use and where to find it
  • Game objects to render when the target is recognized at runtime, parented by the target, and registered to the target's position in the 3D space
  • The scene hierarchy, arranged according to the requirements of the specific SDK, including additional SDK-specific components

We tested our demo scene by running it in the Unity editor and using the webcam attached to the PC to capture the target and show the augmented view. You can readily make fresh...