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!
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).
Catch us live today at 1pm, Irish time. We’ll be working on our Reality Composer scene some more!
The story so far
So far we’ve got two rocket ships, a back up and the launch one, a planet, and a moon orbiting that planet.
We added some behaviors to our rockets to take off and stop when they hit the planet. We experimented with physics bringing our launched rocket back to earth pretty dramatically.
Today
Today we’ll explore tweaking our scene in various ways. We’ll also show you what some of the other icons on the Reality Composer toolbar do.
I know a few of you really want to get that rocket to land on the planet…
So we’re going to explore a few ways we might get that rocket to land on the planet. Maybe you’ll come up with another, better way?
So come join us and have a bit of fun with augmented reality and hash out how we’ll get our ship to land!
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.
First off, I want to apologize for those trying to follow the live stream for the last few sessions. It’s been pretty poor quality, and as hard as programming can be, it’s even harder when you can’t follow along the taps and touches we’re making on screen!
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.
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)!