Summary

In this chapter, we took a very quick look at what immersive computing and AR is all about. We learned that augmented reality covers the middle ground of the immersive computing spectrum, that AR is just a careful blend of illusions used to trick the user into believing that their reality has been combined with a virtual one. After all, Google developed ARCore as a way to provide a better set of tools for constructing those illusions and to keep Android competitive in the AR market. After that, we learned the core concepts ARCore was designed to address and looked at each: motion tracking, environmental understanding, and light estimation, in a little more detail. Finally, we finished with a helpful roadmap for users looking to get the most out of this book in the shortest amount of time.

In the next chapter, we begin to dive in and get our hands dirty by getting the sample Android project set up and tweaked for our needs.