Summary

We began this chapter by first reviewing some concepts on environment tracking and exploring how ARCore keeps track of the environment. Then, we moved on to meshing and how it is used to generate planes and surfaces. From there, we moved on to interacting with the environment, where we saw how a touch gesture is interpreted and converted into a position in a 3D scene. After that, we learned some basics about OpenGL ES and how our point cloud is rendered. We then took a deep dive and introduced the low-level rendering process of shaders. With this, we then modified the point cloud vertex shader in order to colorize the points by distance.

Lighting is a critical element to the whole illusion of augmented reality. In the next chapter, we will dive back into Unity and learn about light estimation.