Packt Publishing Hands-On Augmented Reality With Arcore And Unity

Also, consider tactic displays as augmented reality for touch. A simple example is, the Apple Watch with a mapping app that will tap you on your wrist with haptic vibrations to remind you it's time to turn at the next intersection. Bionics is another example of this. It's not hard to consider the current advances in prosthetics for amputees as AR for the body, augmenting kinesthesia perception of body position and movement.

However, augmented reality is not just the combining of computer data with human senses. There's more to it than that. In his acclaimed 1997 research report, A Survey of augmented reality( ~azuma/ARpresence.pdf), Ronald Azuma proposed AR meet the following characteristics:

As wonderful as this AR future may seem, before moving on, it would be remiss not to highlight the alternative possible dystopian future of augmented reality! If you haven't seen it yet, we strongly recommend watching the Hyper-Reality video produced by artist Keiichi Matsuda ( ). This depiction of an incredible, frightening, yet very possible potential future infected with AR, as the artist explains, presents a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, and the city is saturated in media. But let's not worry about that right now. A screenshot of the video is as follows:

We've discussed what augmented reality is, but how does it work? As we said earlier, AR requires that we combine the real environment with a computer-generated virtual environment. The graphics are registered to the real 3D world. And, this must be done in real time.

In contrast to handheld mobiles, AR devices worn like eyeglasses or futuristic visors, such as Microsoft HoloLens and Metavision Meta, may be referred to as optical see-through eyewear augmented reality devices, or simply, smartglasses. As illustrated in the following image, they do not use video to capture and render the real world. Instead, you look directly through the visor and the computer graphics are optically merged with the scene:

Snapchat's popular augmented reality selfies go even further. Using the phone's front-facing camera, the app analyzes your face using complex AI pattern matching algorithms to identify significant points, or nodes, that correspond to the features of your face--eyes, nose, lips, chin, and so on. It then constructs a 3D mesh, like a mask of your face. Using that, it can apply alternative graphics that match up with your facial features and even morph and distort your actual face for play and entertainment. See this video for a detailed explanation from Snapchat's Vox engineers: =Pc2aJxnmzh0. The ability to do all of this in real time is remarkably fun and serious business:

Why augmented reality? In today's world, we are flooded with vast amounts of information through 24/7 media, internet connectivity, and mobile devices. The problem is not whether we have enough information, but that we have too much. The challenge is how to filter, process, and use valuable information and ignore redundant, irrelevant, and incorrect information. This is explained by Schmalsteig and Hollerer in their book, Augmented Reality, Principles, and Practice (Addison Wesley, 2016):

In this chapter, we introduced you to augmented reality, trying to define and describe what AR is, and what it is not, including comparing AR to its sister technology, namely virtual reality. Then, we described how AR works by separating handheld mobile AR from optical eyewear AR devices. In both cases, we described the typical features of such devices and why they're necessary for AR applications. Traditionally, AR is accomplished using video see-through and preprogrammed targets, such as markers or images. Wearable eyewear AR and emerging mobile devices use 3D spatial maps to model the environment and combine virtual objects more realistically because they can do things such as occlusion and physics between the real-world map and virtual objects. We then reviewed the many types of targets, including coded markers, images, and complex objects, and summarized many of the technical issues with AR, including field of view, visual perception, and display resolution. Finally, we looked at some real applications of AR, including those illustrated with projects in this book.

Abstract:Augmented Reality (AR) provides an alternative to the traditional forms of interaction between humans and machines, and facilitates the access to certain technologies to groups of people with special needs like children. For instance, in pediatric healthcare, it is important to help children to feel comfortable during medical procedures and tests that may be performed on them. To tackle such an issue with the help of AR-based solutions, this article presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel open-source collaborative framework that enables to develop teaching, training, and monitoring pediatric healthcare applications. Specifically, such a framework allows for building collaborative applications and shared experiences for AR devices, providing functionalities for connecting with other AR devices and enabling real-time visualization and simultaneous interaction with virtual objects. Since all the communications involved in AR interactions are handled by AR devices, the proposed collaborative framework is able to operate autonomously through a Local Area Network (LAN), thus requiring no cloud or external servers. In order to demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework, a practical use case application is presented. Such an application has been designed to motivate pediatric patients and to encourage them to increase their physical activity through AR games. The presented games do not require any previous configuration, as they use ARCore automatic surface detection technology. Moreover, the AR mobile gaming framework allows multiple players to engage in the same AR experience, so children can interact and collaborate among them sharing the same AR content. In addition, the proposed AR system provides a remote web application that is able to collect and to visualize data on patient use, aiming to provide healthcare professionals with qualified data about the mobility and mood of their patients through an intuitive and user-friendly web tool. Finally, to determine the performance of the proposed AR system, this article presents its evaluation in terms of latency and processing time. The results show that both times are low enough to provide a good user experience.Keywords: augmented reality; mixed reality; gaming; ARCore; teaching; training; online education; pediatric; mobile health; eHealth

Augmented Reality allows for radical innovations in countless areas. It magically blends the physical and virtual worlds, bringing applications from a screen into your hands. Meanwhile, Unity has now become the leading platform to develop augmented reality experiences, as it provides a great pipeline for working with 3D assets. 2b1af7f3a8