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

Building for iOS with ARKit


Although we made this project for Microsoft HoloLens devices, that certainly is not a requirement. In this section, we will adapt the project for mobile devices using the Apple ARKit.

As we now know, the HoloLens device includes a depth sensing camera that estimates the distance of each pixel in view and stitches together a mesh, or spatial map, of the environment. Similar technologies are also available in Google Tango and Intel RealSense. New smartphones are emerging with these sensors built in, and that will make it easier to implement projects such as this using mobile phone devices rather than the expensive HoloLens HMD.

Apple introduced ARKit for iOS 11 to solve this problem without the need for special depth-sensing hardware in the mobile device. It uses regular camera and AI software to scan the environment and infer depth information based on parallax and other spatial cues, and then track the device's movement using its built-in motion sensors.

For iOS...