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 got our development system set up and ready to do augmented reality development, whether that be a Windows PC or a macOS. First, we installed Unity, which will be the game engine platform for all the projects in this book, including optional components that you will need, depending on your target build AR device. Then we presented a short introduction to using Unity, emphasizing the key features that you'll need to get started.

Then we introduced two AR SDKs that we use in this book. Vuforia is a professional toolkit that has many features and is easy to use, but carries a license fee for commercial products. We also looked at ARToolkit, an open source project, perhaps less capable than Vuforia but more transparent and extendable. For each SDK, we walked you through the installation and then built a simple demo AR application.

However, that's only half the setup battle. In the next chapter, we show you how to set up your system to build and deploy your projects...