Developing an Augmented Reality Hello World App with zero coding in Unity using ARFoundation and XRInteractionToolkit

Introduction

In this article we are going to create a simple Augmented Reality Experience where you can place a cube on any plane surface. This serves as a perfect Hello World Example to get started with Augmented Reality. We are gonna be using Unity and a bunch of packages to do so. There is absolutely zero coding involved in this Hello World Example.

Before diving into the practical steps, let’s understand a few things first. A lot of the steps that you see ahead will seem like “magic”. It’s as if you are just following instructions, blindly. You won’t understand the underlying concepts and that’s totally fine. Get it working first. Then we can jump into the “Why” aspect of each step involved.

So what are we developing here? Let’s take a look. Here I have my phone and I will launch my app. Once I open my app you see that my phone’s camera starts capturing my room. This is the user’s environment.

As I move the phone around slowly and scan my room, it starts tracking the plane surfaces in my room. This is being done through Environmental Understanding and Plane Detection.

What is Environmental Understanding?

Environmental Understanding refers to understanding the real world environment by detecting feature points and planes and using them as reference points…