Tech Tuesday - Introduction to Augmented Reality

I started a new series on my Instagram (whatminjaplays) called Tech Tuesday, where I go through different coding related things on my stories.

This time I have Augmented Reality theme month where I'm publishing a new introduction tutorial every week. The tutorials are created using Unity game engine and Google ARCore. This blog post will show a small sneak peek of every tutorial and I will update this with a link to the tutorial after I have published them!

These tutorials assume you have at least basic understanding of how Unity works (what are GameObjects and Prefabs etc) so if you are new to Unity I recommend you to first go through their beginner tutorial Roll-a-Ball that explains the basics well!

What is Augmented Reality?

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology which allows virtual objects to be mixed with real environment by augmenting them into our sight. The most popular example that probably everyone knows is the mobile game Pokemon GO. The player is walking around catching creatures that are augmented into the camera view using mobile phone.

This tutorial series is meant for beginners who would like to learn the basics of Augmented Reality. The tech has developed a lot in the past few years, but I wanted to start with beginner friendly introduction with easier features.

First week

First tutorial goes through how to install Unity game engine and how to download Google ARCore capabilities to it. There's some steps that you need to do before starting the actual development and by following this tutorial you get a starting point for the future projects you might create.

Link to the tutorial
Link to the finished project

Second week

Next tutorial shows how to use Augmented Images. We will create an Android AR app that displays 3D models on detected images!

Link to the tutorial
Link to the finished project

Third week

Third tutorial is about Plane Detection. ARCore is capable of detecting horizontal and vertical planes (for example floors and walls). On this tutorial we create an application which will add a virtual picture frame on wall.

Link to the tutorial
Link to the finished project

Fourth week

We will create a hologram face filter on the last tutorial of this introduction series! The filter takes inspiration from one of my favorite video games Horizon Zero Dawn.

Link to the tutorial
Link to the finished project

Conclusion

I've been working with Augmented Reality already for the past 5 years and have enjoyed learning about it a lot! I hope you have also learned something from this series and let me know if you would like me to do more tutorials about AR!

Tech Tuesdays of next month will be about Creative Code! You can follow my Instagram whatminjaplays if you want to see a new tutorial every Tuesday or just follow me here for the blog post with the links to all the tutorials that will be published end of February!

So next month I will be only publishing one blog post about Tech Tuesday, and other weeks I'm going to be talking about different topics, such as Virtual Reality and some tips about how I keep my blog post organized!