Exploring Vuforia and Unity

The past week or so I have delved into Unity to create an augmented reality (AR) app with Vuforia. This is a completely different process of creating AR as compared to Aurasma / HP Reveal which has been my AR content creation tool for the past 5 years.

Each step in the process was painstaking as I learned from a number of YouTube tutorials and although a few were very helpful, each one had crucial steps missing – for example you need to download the Java Development Kit (JDK) and the Software Development Kit (SDK) before you can build something in Unity (an APK – Android PacKage).

This tutorial was pretty helpful – from Alistair (Playful Technology)

I guess what I am learning is like Photoshop, there is more that one way to do the same thing, which does make things complex. Unity has massive capabilities and I have not even scraped the surface. There is going to be some steep learning over the next months.

Anyway, between the tutorials and some help from my husband, I managed to make something. But the audio wasn’t working. Sad face. Thank goodness for Unity Jedi Master Josiah from Lobaki who helped me troubleshoot and debug the code by building a custom component. Wow – that sounds tricky 😉

Now I have something that works 🙂 It is great to be able to build something without having extensive knowledge of Unity. I feel more confident to explore other possibilities for AR and VR using this software now I have managed to make something.

Here is a video from my phone. Note that the audio might be a bit loud.

Vuforia AR Test from bytetime on Vimeo.