Jonathan Linowes - Augmented Reality for Developers: Build practical augmented reality applications with Unity, ARCore, ARKit, and Vuforia

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Copyright 2017 Packt Publishing

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First published: October 2017

Production reference: 1051017

ISBN: 978-1-78728-643-6

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Jonathan Linowes is principal at Parkerhill Reality Labs, an immersive media Indie studio. He is a veritable 3D graphics enthusiast, Unity developer, successful entrepreneur, and teacher. He has a fine arts degree from Syracuse University and a masters degree from the MIT Media Lab. He has founded several successful startups and held technical leadership positions at major corporations, including Autodesk Inc. He is the author of other books and videos by Packt, including Unity Virtual Reality Projects (2015) and Cardboard VR Projects for Android (2016).

Krystian Babilinski is an experienced Unity developer with extensive knowledge in 3D design. He has been developing professional AR/VR applications since 2015. He led Babilin Applications, a Unity Design group that promotes open source development and engages with the the Unity community. Krystian now leads the development at Parkerhill Reality Labs, which recently published Power Solitaire VR, a multiplatform VR game.

Micheal Lanham is a solutions architect with petroWEB and currently resides in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada. In his current role, he develops integrated GIS applications with advanced ML and spatial search capabilities. He has worked as a professional and amateur game developer; he has been building desktop and mobile games for over 15 years. In 2007, Micheal was introduced to Unity 3D and has been an avid developer, consultant, and manager of multiple Unity games and graphic projects ever since.

Micheal had previously written Augmented Reality Game Development and Game Audio Development with Unity 5.x, also published by Packt in 2017.

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Augmented Reality has been said to be the next major computing platform. This book shows you how to build exciting AR applications with Unity 3D and the leading AR toolkits for a spectrum of mobile and wearable devices.
The book opens with an introduction to augmented reality, including the markets, technologies, and development tools. You will begin with setting up your development machine for Android, iOS, and/or Windows development, and learn the basics of using Unity and the Vuforia AR platform as well as the open source ARToolKit, Microsoft Mixed Reality toolkit, Google ARCore, and Apples ARKit!
You will then focus on building AR applications, exploring a variety of recognition targeting methods. You will go through full projects illustrating key business sectors, including marketing, education, industrial training, and gaming.
Throughout the book, we introduce major concepts in AR development, best practices in user experience, and important software design patterns that every professional and aspiring software developer should use.
It was quite a challenge to construct the book in a way that (hopefully) retains its usefulness and relevancy for years to come. There is an ever-increasing number of platforms, toolkits, and AR-capable devices emerging each year. There are solid general-purpose toolkits such as Vuforia and the open-source ARToolkit, which support both Android and iOS devices. There is the beta Microsoft HoloLens and its Mixed Reality Toolkit for Unity. We had nearly completed writing this book when Apple announced its debut into the market with ARKit, and Google ARCore, so we took the time to integrate ARKit and ARCore into our chapter projects too.