Chapter 1, Augment Your World, will introduce you to augmented reality and how it works, including a range of best practices, devices, and practical applications.
Chapter 2, Setting Up Your System, walks you through installing Unity, Vuforia, ARToolkit, and other software needed to develop AR projects on Windows or Mac development machines. It also includes a brief tutorial on how to use Unity.
Chapter 3, Building Your App, continues from Chapter 2, Setting Up Your System, to ensure that your system is set up to build and run AR on your preferred target devices, including Android, iOS, and Windows Mixed Reality (HoloLens).
Chapter 4, Augmented Business Cards, takes you through the building of an app that augments your business card. Using a drone photography company as the example, we make its business card come to life with a flying drone in AR.
Chapter 5, AR Solar System, demonstrates the application of AR for science and education. We build an animated model of the solar system using actual NASA scale, orbits, and texture data.
Chapter 6, How to Change a Flat Tire, dives into the Unity user interface (UI) development and also explores the software design pattern, while building a how-to instruction manual. The result is a regular mobile app using text, image, and video media. This is part 1 of the project.
Chapter 7, Augmenting the Instruction Manual, takes the mobile app developed in the previous chapter and augments it, adding 3D AR graphics as a new media type. This project demonstrates how AR need not be the central feature of an app but simply another kind of media.
Chapter 8, Room Decoration with AR, demonstrates the application of AR for design, architecture, and retail visualization. In this project, you can decorate your walls with framed photos, with a world-space toolbar to add, remove, resize, position, and change the pictures and frames.
Chapter 9, Poke the Ball Game, demonstrates the development of a fun ballgame that you can play on your real-world coffee table or desk using virtual balls and game court. You shoot the ball at the goal, aim to win, and keep score.
Each project can be built using a selection of AR toolkits and hardware devices, including Vuforia or the open source ARToolkit for Android or iOS. We also show how to build the same projects to target iOS with Apple ARKit, Google ARCore, and HoloLens with the Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit.
