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


In this chapter, we built an app that is really designed to augment the real world. There are many uses for apps like this, in architecture, design, and retail for example. Our app lets you decorate your walls with framed photos. We developed this project first for HoloLens wearable AR smartglasses, and then we moved it to mobile AR devices using ARKit and Vuforia.

We created an object hierarchy for a picture that includes a frame, an image, a toolbar, and a couple of menus for selecting frames and images. We built a 3D UI framework from scratch that supports toolbars, action buttons, manipulation tools, and modal menus. Then we took a pretty deep dive into the Mixed Reality Toolkit Input Manager and Gaze Recognizer input event systems, as well as the HoloLens spatial mapping room mesh features. Along the way, we used more features of Unity via C# scripts, including tags, audio clips, animations, colliders, and textures.

Then we reworked the project for mobile AR devices. First, we...