What is AR?

AR (Augmented Reality) uses the mobile phone camera to modify the real world. It adds to the real world visual elements or sounds in order to make it more interactive. How does AR look like? Well, you point your camera mobile phone to a specific place. And let's say you see a table and a chair. With the help of augmented reality, you can add a computer on the table. Even though it does not exist in reality. See an example in the image below, where it is obvious the androids do not exist in reality.

Augmented Reality vs. Virtual Reality

• Augmented reality uses the existing real-world environment and puts virtual information on top of it to enhance the experience.
• Virtual reality creates a completely new world.

• Vuforia (we will see today how it works)
• ARCore (we will learn about it in the following sessions)
• ARKit
• AR Foundation (based on ARCore)
• etc.

Vuforia

Vuforia an augmented reality SDK for mobile devices. With the help of computer vision, Vuforia tracks the surrounding environment and let's us place virtual objects in the real world at a specific position.
Probably you have heard of QR codes. If not, a QR code is a special barcode, which looks like an image. This image however has some hidden information. When we scan the QR code with our phone camera, we can see the hidden information: for instance, a 3D model.


Let's see how we can implement this ourselves with the help of Unity and Vuforia. 😃 
We need to create an account on Vuforia and to create a database. In order to see how to do this, follow this tutorial (ignore the Unity part - we care only about what you have to do on the Vuforia website).

For the Unity part, follow this tutorial.