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

Summary


For this chapter, we started with the 2D instruction manual project developed in Chapter 6, How to Change a Flat Tire, and extended it to include augmented reality graphics as a new media type. After preparing the project to use the Vuforia SDK, we first implemented a screen button to toggle AR Mode. The AR Model hides the 2D content panel and allows the camera video feed to show.

We set up the project to capture User Defined Targets. We added an AR Prompt panel with a cursor, circle registration guide, and a Capture button. When the button is pressed, the app uses the current view as the AR target and displays the AR content on it. We used Vuforia's Trackable Events to know when to hide AR Prompt or to show a red circle as an error prompt if the capture target is of poor quality.

With the AR mode and user-defined targets, we then integrated 3D annotations into the instruction manual. The graphics are prefabs we imported into the project, and one may be instantiated when the user navigates...