Understanding AR image tracking

Before we start building our project, let's take a moment to learn how AR image tracking works. In this section, I'll introduce some of the basic principles behind image recognition and tracking, and what makes some images better than others for this purpose.

As we know, the principles behind augmented reality involve using compute mechanisms to recognize features in the real world, determine their position and orientation in a 3D space, instantiate virtual objects relative to and anchored within this 3D space, and track the user as they move within this space. Modern devices can accomplish this using their video cameras and other sensors built into the device to performing real-time spatial mapping of the environment. A different approach is for the device to track predetermined images. That is what we will use for the project in this chapter.

Augmented reality technology was born in the 1990s, where QR code-like marker images were used...