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

Getting and using ARToolkit


This section describes the ARToolkit SDK for augmented reality development (http://artoolkit.org/). If you don't want to use ARToolkit, you can skip this section.

ARToolkit is an open source software project. It is free to use both for the development and the distribution of your apps that use it. Unlike Vuforia, there are no license fees. As an open source project, the source code is available to anyone who wants to use it, read it, and even extend it. ARToolkit is owned by DAQRI, a prominent AR industry leader, and is free to use under a LGPL v3.0 license (see http://archive.artoolkit.org/artoolkit-licensing).

If you distribute an app built with ARToolkit, it needs to include an acknowledgement and license notice, for example, in an about box. ARToolkit has the distinction of being perhaps the first and continuously supported open source AR SDK since 1999.

ARToolkit compares favorably to Vuforia, provided your needs fit within the scope of its features. However...