Augmented Reality - Research Task

I have always been fascinated with Augmented Reality and felt that its amazing capabilities have not been fully explored yet. I decided to research some basic AR use with Unity and couldn’t believe how easy it is to implement thanks to third party software Vuforia.

Firstly sign up to Vuforia on their website, it's completely free to do.

Once you are a member you can download the Vuforia Unity Package and open it in a new unity project.

Now that the package has been imported the first thing to do is to delete the main camera in your scene.

Go into your assets under Vuforia -> Prefabs and drag ARCamera into the scene.

Now return to Vuforias website as there are two things we need to do there.

Firstly create a free license key and copy it. You will need to paste it in unity where you click ARCamera in the hierarchy, then click open Vuforia configuration and paste it under App License Key.

Secondly you need to take a high quality photo of what you want the ARCamera to track, for my demonstration purposes i chose an Ace of Spade playing card. On Vuforias page select Target Manager and Add a Database, this is where you can upload your image. Select single image and locate the file path, set the Width to 1 and name your database, i used Test_Ace. Then click download database and choose as a unity package and again import that into the project.

Go back into the Vuforias Prefabs folder in unity and place an ImageTarget into the scene, select it in the hierarchy and under its script Image Target Behaviour set its Database to Test_Ace. This wont work immediately so go back into the ARCamera configuration and under Datasets tick Load Test_Ace Database and under that tick Activate.

Now when you test your scene and show your card you can see in the editor that your image can bee seen and also lost by the camera. Now we want something to happen when the camera picks up the ace.

Import any 3D model, i made a version of myself as a barbarian in MagicaVoxel and made it a prefab in my scene. Now all you need to do is drag that prefab onto the ImageTarget making it a child. Now test your scene and when the card can be picked up your model should spawn, which you can see in the video below. If you have any questions don't hesitate to email me.

I would love to make a game which utilises Augmented Reality, as i had such a great time working on a board game this Trimester i think i could utilise Augmented Reality to further immerse players in a table top experience.