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

Adding the image target


We can start creating the AR application. As we saw in Chapter 2, Setting Up Your System, we can use the Vuforia cloud service to generate and maintain the database of our target image(s) and then download it for import into Unity, using the following steps.

Adding ImageTarget prefab to the scene

The first part of that is requiring an image target in the scene:

  1. In the Project Assets/Vuforia/Prefabs folder there's a prefab named ImageTarget. Drag that into the Hierarchy.
  2. In the Inspector, in the Image Target Behavior component, locate the Type parameter. It may say No Targets Defined. Press the button to do the creation.

That will open your internet browser to the Vuforia Target Manager web page. This will allow us to use their software to create the target database.

Creating the target database

Let's create a new database for the business card:

  1. Press Add Database and name it BusinessCard.
  2. We will plan to store the image with the app on the device, so define the database as...