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

Augmenting real-world objects


You've probably realized that, although we're using AR to position the game objects, the video feed is little more than a background. For example, the ball bounces or rolls on our game court floor, but otherwise isn't realistically interacting with our table top surroundings.

To be a better augmented reality, the app needs to see and understand the table top environment. Different AR toolkit SDKs approach this problem differently, if at all. The Vuforia toolkit, for example, provides a feature called Smart Terrain that builds a surface mesh from your device's video feed. Similarly (but quite differently), the Microsoft MixedRealityToolkit builds a spatial mesh using its depth sensors and HPU chip and then provides Unity components for surface and smart object understanding. Presently, we will use the Vuforia tools.

About Vuforia Smart Terrain

Smart Terrain is Vuforia's environment reconstruction technique using the video camera on your device and computer vision...