Augmented Reality
Welcome to Augmented Reality Application Development Tutorial subpage.
On this page we go through an augmented reality application development example.
First of all we're going to explain the basics of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). We will also go through the basic software that is needed to build such an application. Finally we're going to develop a demo application that we are going to provide the necessary files for you in order to follow along.
Following tutorial contents
Introduction of what we will be go through:
Virtual and Augmented reality fundamentals
Unity basics
Vuforia basics
Unity setup for our project
Model import and application test
Introduction to VR and AR
In this video the lecturer explains the fundamentals of Virtual Reality (VR), mostly talking about what is it used for, where it is used and how it works.
After that we get into Augmented Reality and the main characteristics of that. We also look at the mixture of VR and AR (MR aka Mixed Reality). Examples of these technologies being used is also shown.
We also give a brief introduction to the Unity game engine and explain why you should consider using it as your first game engine software. Finally we introduce Vuforia software, which is used for AR development. We will briefly go over the main features of it and how it works.
Unity basics
Now it's time to get a grasp of the basics of Unity software.
First we'll go over installation and as we will deal with an AR application for Android, we have to install support for such development.
After the installation is complete we create a new project within Unity and explore the main functionalities of the user interface.
Vuforia basics
We're going to go through the basics of Vuforia AR software.
The very first thing we need to do is to set up a free account in the developer portal.
After that we need to generate a free licence key that we are going to need for our app. Finally we go through creating and downloading a target database for our app.
Unity setup for our project
In this tutorial we're going to setup the unity project and scene.
Firstly we need to install the Vuforia packages for Unity.
After that we setup the unity scene. Then we go through the navigation in unity and try to understand the main concepts of it.
We also setup the Vuforia database and licence in Unity.
3D models import and application testing
We start off by importing the 3D models in unity for which we need the models in .fbx or .obj file format. After the initial import we setup the models in the scene. Then we can do the initial test on our PC webcam. We move on to actual building the application and lastly install the application to our Android smartphone.
The files used can be found here: