Augmented reality development allows you to create experiences that superimpose digital content over the natural or non-virtual world. Explore how to create engaging augmented reality development projects.
Augmented reality (AR) development refers to creating apps, websites, or other projects that use AR technology to deliver digital content integrated with a user’s real-world environment. As the user in AR, you can see or interact with digital content while still looking at your natural or non-virtual environment. The AR program responds and changes appropriately when you interact with digital or physical objects. This technology has a wide range of applications in fields as diverse as engineering, environmental sustainability, medicine, marketing, education, and more.
To create engaging AR development projects, you’ll need to consider how end users will interact with your application and what your goals, as the developer, will be for the user. Learn more about creating engaging augmented reality development projects and best practices for user experience design in augmented reality.
Augmented reality technology is a way to experience digital content without losing the context of your environment and the real world. AR technology allows you to superimpose digital information, like images, videos, or text, onto a user’s visual field. Hence, they appear to experience this digital information seamlessly with their natural environment. This differs slightly from virtual reality, where users experience an entirely virtual world that feels removed from the real world.
Augmented reality works using a variety of other technologies, including:
Computer vision: Allows robots and machines to process and respond to visual cues
Object recognition: Enables machines and computers to recognize objects, faces, or other visual details in images or video
Spatial audio: Gives an immersive quality to audio so that it feels like the music or sounds surround you and have a location in physical space
Geolocation: The practice of associating a piece of digital content, like a 3D image or video, with a physical location
Image tracking: Tracking a 2D object and providing digital content to assist, for example, assembly workers in an industrial setting
Virtual object anchoring: Creating physical objects or images that cue the AR program to provide digital content.
AR filters: Computer-generated effects that superimpose over recognized objects like faces.
AR devices: The computer or device that a user will need to engage with the AR experiences.
To create a safe and immersive augmented reality experience, you will need to do the following:
Plan your AR program
Determine the technology you’ll use
Create the components of your program
Test and optimize the AR experience before presenting it to your company stakeholders or a market of end users
Explore these steps in greater detail:
The first step to augmented reality development is to determine the purpose of the content you plan to develop. Be sure to identify your end users and your goals. For example, you want to create an interactive museum tour, an AR marketing experience, or a game designed for a mobile phone. Each of those projects would have a different group of users with different goals for what kind of experience they want. You can use AR to tell a story, whether about your brand and product, the museum exhibits, or the themes of your game. You can create better user experiences by considering what’s important to your end user.
The next step is to plan what technology you’ll use to bring your AR development project to life. The tool you use will depend on a lot of factors, such as what devices users will use to access your AR and the type of AR you want to offer. Different types include:
Static AR that doesn’t change or can’t be manipulated by users
Interactive AR where users can change and interact with the digital environment
Location-based AR, which shows content based on the user’s location
One important consideration will be the AR platform you choose. Some choices are Apple’s ARKit, Google’s ARCore, and Unity’s AR Foundation. Other options include ARLOOPA Studio, Assemblr Studio, EyeJack Creator, and DEVAR.
After you know the goal for your AR project and what technology you’ll use to develop it, you can use a storyboard or other visualization method to map out the experience from a user’s point of view. This can also help you transition from the concept to its actual execution. Another option is prototyping because it can assist you in understanding the spatial aspects of your AR program in a physical space.
Once you understand the necessary components, you can start creating AR content. For example, you may need to create markers, an image, or other signals instructing your AR program to provide digital content. This might include a QR code, painting, statute, or another visual cue the AR program will react to. You may also need to upload 3D models or renderings of objects you wish to display in AR. In this step, you will add any other graphical components you’ll need and create a user interface for interacting with spatial digital content.
Next, you can combine all of the content you created and, using the technology you identified in the second step, create your immersive augmented reality experience. As with other steps, it's important to remember how your end user will interact with your program as you design it. Elements like your user’s physical location while using your program, device and physical constraints, and safety will play a role in how you build your prototype.
User testing is an important step of the process because it gives you insight into how users feel about your product, how users will use your product, and how your product will perform in different environments, for example, with different devices, in different levels of lighting, or different locations. Use this insight to refine and optimize your prototype into a product you’re ready to take to market.
Last, you’ll need to communicate with the people who will use your AR program. You may do this by communicating your app’s capabilities to a marketing team that will translate that message to potential customers. In other cases, you might educate the end user directly on what your app is capable of and how they can interact with it.
When designing augmented reality experiences with a user interface (UI)/user experience (UX) focus, remember to consider several important factors, such as the user, safety, and ease of use. Try to keep the following tips in mind:
Keep user experience at the forefront: You can build checkpoints into your development process to stop and make sure you’re aligning with your users’ needs, wants, and abilities at every stage of development.
Think about user location and safety: If your users will experience your AR in an uncontrolled environment, be careful not to lead them into dangerous situations, such as walking into traffic. Consider whether users will use your app in a public or private setting.
Consider physical limitations: If your users need to hold or wear a device while engaging with your app, consider how comfortable it will be to hold that position for the entirety of their AR experience.
Allow users to act intuitively: Make sure that your AR experience reacts to intuitive movements, such as changing the visual field as your user moves their head to look around.
Remember data security: Augmented reality can collect a lot of user data, so be sure that you implement appropriate security measures.
Augmented reality development is an exciting field with applications in many different industries. If you want to learn more about augmented reality development or explore a career in the field, you can begin today on Coursera. For example, you can explore Extended Reality for Everybody Specialization offered by the University of Michigan. This course covers all things regarding augmented, virtual, and mixed reality.
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