Preparing the Development Environment

The main platform used in this project is an IDE called Unity3d. It is very popular in game development for providing a set of tools that allows developers to quickly deploy virtual environments. In our case we will use Unity3d to model the virtual building and other objecs that will interact with the user. Besides the fact of Unity3d be one of the best IDE for this type of development, it's cross platform and multiportable; which means that can be developed in different Operational Systems (Windows, Mac, Linux,...) and run in several different devices (Android, iOS, webBrowser, Xbox, Wii...). You can have a better overview about it here:

Therefore, the first step in preparing the development environment is to download and install Unity3D. We are using few components that requires a specific version of Unity (4.1 and below). You can find the right version here: Mac: http://download.unity3d.com/download_unity/unity-4.1.0.dmg Windows: http://download.unity3d.com/download_unity/UnitySetup-4.1.0.exe

here are some links with usefull information about unity: http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules/beginner/editor http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/UnityBasics.html

On the top of Unity 3D we will be using an SDK to handle the Augmented Reallity features, called Vuforia. It will basically replace the ordinary Camera Object with a special type of Camera Object that will allows us to project Virtual Objects (the Building) in images from the real world collected by a Real Camera. This is another advanced concept that involves a lot of Math and heavy coding that we have a wonderful piece of software to deal with. Once more, we just need to understand how to use it. You do not need to install the Vuforia SDK, because it's libraries are integraded with this repository. The next session will discuss about how to use it, but it's good to check some references to get used to it.

Take a look at the Developers web site and check what we can archive using Vuforia: https://www.vuforia.com/platform

After you have Unity3d installed and you are familiar with it's interface is time to download the project source files.

You can download the files directly on the address: https://github.com/Compy/buildingterry/archive/master.zip

Or you can clone/fork the project using git: https://github.com/Compy/buildingterry.git

If you download the zipped file, extract it. If you have it cloned, just keep track of the folder location.