We're at the dawn of a whole new computing platform, preceded by personal computers, the internet, and mobile device revolutions. Augmented reality (AR) is the future, today!
Let's help invent this future where your daily world is augmented by digital information, assistants, communication, and entertainment. As it emerges, there is a booming need for developers and other skilled makers to design and build these applications.
This book aims to educate you about the underlying AR technologies, best practices, and steps for making AR apps, using some of the most powerful and popular 3D development tools available, including Unity with Vuforia, Apple ARKit, Google ARCore, Microsoft HoloLens, and the open source ARToolkit. We will guide you through the making of quality content appropriate to a variety of AR devices and platforms and their intended uses.
In this first chapter, we introduce you to AR and talk about how it works and how it can be used. We will explore some of the key concepts and technical achievements that define the state of the art today. We then show examples of effective AR applications, and introduce the devices, platforms, and development tools that will be covered throughout this book.
Welcome to the future!
We will cover the following topics in this chapter:
- Augmented reality versus virtual reality
- How AR works
- Types of markers
- Technical issues with augmented reality
- Applications of augmented reality
- The focus of this book
