You’ll need a book handy, or something else you can get a good picture of and use as your image anchor.
Recap
For yesterday’s session we built some images in Keynote specifically for purposes of printing out to use as augmented reality anchors.
We were able to create a mini-school tour of different departments for each logo for the different discipline.
Today’s Session
That may have been a bit unfair, especially to those of you following along at home, live. We built the images in Keynote with you, but we already had them printed out and ready to go!
So today, I want you to make sure you have a book lying around.
We’re going to build an AR experience off the cover of your favorite book. (Or whatever book is handy.)
Our session yesterday was a little bit plagued by technical issues, it turns out, if you were watching on Twitch.
But what we went through, besides saying, “We can’t see anything!” a lot, was the very beginning of creating an AR scene that will use an image as its anchor.
Today’s session
Because yesterday was such a shambles we’re going to repeat most of what we did today.
We’ll demonstrate creating some good images for anchors to use in our AR scenes. I used Keynote yesterday, and I’ll show you a good way to get shapes. Print out the shapes, take a screenshot of your slide, and that’s what we’ll transpose a virtual object onto in our AR experience.
So join us today and we’ll get creating some amazing augmented reality scenes!
We finished up our Lunar Lander game yesterday with a little demo of how you’d hook this game up in Xcode. We won’t be going any further (yet) with Xcode, but if you want to check it out, I put the source code for yesterday’s demo up at https://github.com/mhanlon/LunarLander.
If you don’t feel like you’re ready for it just yet, don’t worry, we’ll get to Xcode soon enough!
Today’s session
We’re going to try out something new today…
We’ll learn how to use an image anchor.
If you’ve watched the Harry Potter movies, or maybe you’ve read the books and imagined what the Daily Prophet must have looked like with its moving pictures, well, this is the sort of thing we can do with image anchors.
With an image anchor we can attach our augmented reality content to a particular pattern found in the real world.
For starters, we’ll talk about some strategies for making good anchor images.
I love this part of augmented reality and can’t wait to show you how to stick content to your own images!
For today’s work we’re going to finish off our lunar lander game (for now) with a little bit of groundwork for what might come next.
In the image above I’ve added a Boost button, because maybe I’m a little frustrated, as a player, with the boost buttons being in augmented reality. I don’t want to have to hunt for them when I just want to keep my rocket from crashing.
We’ll hook up some actions and triggers that will allow us to write code to recognize things that happen in our AR scene. Like a fuel gauge, for example. Each time we boost the rocket we spend some fuel. In a real game we would want to keep track of how much fuel we have left.
We’ll spend the first part of the session working through some additions to the Reality Composer project on the iPad.
The second half (or so) will be a little demo of what’s possible. You can follow along, if you have a Mac and Xcode installed.
We’ll be running a session, soon, where we introduce you to Xcode and the next logical step in your development, as a coder. But this will be just the start of dipping our toes in.
Last week we had a rocket ship on its way to land on the moon. We hooked up a button to apply force to the rocket to keep it from crashing straight down to the ground.
It wasn’t the most sophisticated lunar game-style game, but it’s a start!
Today’s session
Today we’re going to add a couple other wrinkles, maybe some obstacles on the ground to avoid. This will mean adding more controls.
We’re also going to hook up certain triggers and actions that get sent so that, in the future, we can take advantage of these events in our code.
This is how you would build an app to react to things that happen in your augmented reality scene.
If you want to learn more about notification triggers and actions, you can see some really nice examples of it in action, you should check out Building AR Experiences with Reality Composer.
This was a session at WWDC 2019 and it goes into a bit more detail (and a bit more code).
Today we’ll be playing around with Reality Composer some more. Sticking with our horizontal plane anchor, we’ll work on adding behaviors. This will let us explore how objects we place interact with each other with different settings.
This will involve playing around with physics and materials a little bit, to see which material and combination of settings gets you the behavior you want to see.
Since we’ve built a rocket ship scene, maybe we’ll add some planets to our project.
If you want to dive into more AR and just can’t wait for our next session, you might want to check out developer.apple.com. They have amazing sessions like this: Building AR Experiences with Reality Composer, which are very relevant to the work we’ve been doing.
Even if you just watch those for aspirational purposes, we’ll try and re-create some of their examples with you during our sessions. If you have a favorite you’d like to see, why not drop us a line in the discussions?
Catching Up
Like we’ve done with other video series, we’ve gathered the augmented reality series into a playlist. You can now go sit and watch all the videos here, on this landing page.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the AR Makr sessions; they’ve really built an amazing tool for telling stories. It’s a great way to try out augmented reality for yourself, and the way they allow you to create your own is brilliant.
I’ve loved seeing the odd planets people have designed and being able to walk through their creations!
Reality Composer
For today’s session we’re going to go into Reality Composer a bit more. Reality Composer is Apple’s app for building out scenes.
Slide from session 609, WWDC2019: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/609
A scene is comprised of an anchor in the real world: it could be a table top, a wall, an image, or a face. That thing, the table top, wall, image, or face, will be what we use to anchor the objects we want to add to our reality.
Reality Composer also lets us define behaviors for those objects and can have them interact with physics… but not just normal physics, like the regular gravity of your particular scene, you can define how strong or weak you want the pull of gravity to be!
We’ll go looking for some more great video sessions from Apple on this technology during today’s session. This will really pay off for us later this month, when all the Worldwide Developer Conference 2020 sessions start getting posted online.
Blast off!
So we’ll see you today at 1pm, when we’ll build our own rocket ship taking off, right in your very own living room (or wherever you’re watching this session)!
Yesterday we had a whirlwind tour of AR Makr, Reality Composer, and the Augmented Reality playground from Apple to show you what we can do with augmented reality on the iPad. It also highlights the number of ways we can play around with AR!
Today’s session
Today we’re going to go back to AR Makr and build out a scene and play with some of the built-in animations.
One of the most difficult things I’ve found about augmented reality and building augmented reality apps or playgrounds is building decent 3D models to use in my real life scene.
AR Makr (and, as we’ll see with Reality Composer and the AR Create playground) has some amazing built-in models for us to use. And it lets us create our own in pretty fun, easy ways.
Our old Max the fox is back! (Borrowed from the Apple SceneKit sample code.)
So come catch up with us at 1pm today for some augmenting of your reality!
