The technical requirements for this chapter are as follows:

Hardware (from https://docs.unity3d.com/2019.1/Documentation/Manual/system-requirements.html):

• CPU: SSE2 instruction set support
• GPU: Graphics card with DX10 (shader model 4.0) capabilities

Operating system:

• Windows: 7 SP1+, 8, 10, and 64-bit versions only
• macOS: 10.12+
• Linux: Fixed at Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, and CentOS 7

Software for Android development:

• Java Development Kit (1.8.0 in this book)
• Unity 3D (2019.1.2f1 in this book)
• Android SDK (included in the Unity installation)
• Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2017 (included in the Unity installation)

The resources and the code files for this chapter can be found here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Enterprise-Augmented-Reality-Projects/tree/master/Chapter02.

When we think of tools that we can use to develop video games that have had a great impact in recent years, one name stands out above all others: Unity. Unity is a graphics engine that helps us in developing video games, interactive projects, visualizations, and 2D and 3D animations in real-time for different platforms. Unity offers a complete visual editor with scripting so that we can create applications with a professional finish.

For this purpose, Unity is composed of a package of tools that have been designed to facilitate the tasks of designing and programming the different aspects of a video game, including graphics, physics, animations, and artificial intelligence. Unity is a unique development system that focuses on assets and not on the code like other similar 3D modeling applications do. The content of the game is built from the editor and the game...

In this book, we are going to use Unity to develop Android mobile applications. To create Android apps, we need to have the Java Development Kit (JDK) and Android Software Development Kit (SDK) installed.

Since Unity directly provides the Android SDK installation, we will install the JDK first and then proceed to install Unity on our computer.

To install the JDK, follow these steps:

1. Go to Oracle's download page at https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8...

The first time you open the Unity editor, you will see a layout with different bars and windows, similar to what can be seen in the following screenshot:

At first glance, the Unity configuration slightly reminds us of 3D modeling tools, with the 3D scene in the middle, although it has more panels on the sides than modeling tools does. Although it can look a bit daunting to understand everything if you are not familiarized with 3D tools, the Unity interface is quite straightforward and has remained very much the same throughout the Unity versions. The main components that can be seen in the preceding screenshot are as follows (from top left to bottom right):

• The Toolbar: Here, we have the main buttons so that we can manipulate objects in the Scene view to test the scene.
• The Hierarchy window: The Hierarchy window...

An application built in Unity will be made up of a project. This project will contain all the necessary elements that we'll need in order to develop the application, such as models, scripts, plans, menus, and much more. When you start up Unity, you can open a project by pointing to its root folder. 

Each project contains one or more documents, called scenes. The projects that are created in Unity are structured into scenes, where a scene can be any part of the project. When we talk about applications, a scene can be from the start menu to any level or area of it. A single scene will contain many elements, such as a user interface, 3D objects, scripts, and so on.

Some of the main elements you can find in a Unity project are as follows:

• Assets
• GameObjects
• Components
• Scripts
• Prefabs

First, we will look at Assets.

To see all the potential of scripts in Unity, we are going to take a look at the script we created in the previous section, CubeHandler.cs. As its name suggests, we are going to add some code to it to manipulate the cube in the scene.

Double-click on the name of the script in the Project window to open it in Visual Studio.

If you already had Visual Studio installed on your computer before you installed Unity, it's possible that Unity won't detect it automatically when double-clicking on the script. If so, you'll have to go to Edit|Preferences and go to External Tools. From there, select the path to the .exe file of Visual Studio:

Upon opening the script, you will see the following auto-generated code:

using System.Collections;
using System...

In this chapter, we learned how to install Unity and the necessary modules to make it work so that we can build mobile applications. We also introduced how the Unity interface is designed, its main windows, and how to customize their composition for our needs. We took a look at the main windows, their tools, and how to use them. Then, we learned about the main elements we can find in a Unity project and how to create/import them. Finally, we created our first script with a few lines of code to understand how easily we can control and alter objects on a scene.

In the next chapter and the ones that follow, we will work with all of the elements we learned about in this chapter in order to generate fully functional AR projects.