Summary
In this chapter, we built a science project, a lot like I did when I was 8 years old; however, instead of wires and styrofoam balls, we made our solar system for augmented reality. Here, virtual objects interact with the real world using special cards we made with coded markers, one for each planet view. This idea could be extended, instead of cards, to pages in a book or labels on products.
Our first step was to make the earth, using an equirectangular texture of the earth's surface to build the material mapped to a sphere. Then, we added a second texture for the night side of the globe. Similarly, we built all the nine planets, the moon, and the sun. Each body was scaled and rotated accurately based on NASA data, but we compressed space and time for distance and orbits in some cases. The sun provides the light source.
We also learned to program in C# for Unity, writing short scripts to spin and orbit the planets, move the center viewpoint, and change the time scale in response to...
