#How to implement Augmented Reality in Ionic apps

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Augmented Reality (AR) in Ionic Apps: Transforming User Experiences

Augmented Reality (AR) is revolutionizing user engagement with mobile applications. By overlaying digital information in the real world, AR provides immersive experiences that engage users like never before. The Ionic Framework, known for its robust and flexible app development capabilities, is perfectly suited for incorporating AR, transforming user experiences, and setting new standards in app design.

What is Augmented Reality (AR)?

Augmented Reality (AR) combines the physical world with digital content, enhancing real-world environments with computer-generated perceptual information. Unlike Virtual Reality (VR), which creates a completely virtual environment, AR overlays digital elements onto the real world, providing a blended view that enhances the user's perception of reality.

The Ionic Framework

Ionic is an open-source framework that facilitates the creation of high-quality mobile and desktop apps using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Its key features include a comprehensive library of pre-designed components, powerful CLI tools, and seamless integration with various front-end frameworks. Ionic's versatility and ease of use make it a popular choice for developers aiming to create innovative applications.

Benefits of Integrating AR in Ionic Apps

Integrating AR into Ionic apps offers several advantages:

Enhanced User Engagement: AR adds an interactive layer to applications, making them more engaging and enjoyable.

Improved User Experience: AR provides intuitive and immersive experiences, leading to higher user satisfaction.

Competitive Advantage: Offering AR features can differentiate your app in the competitive app market, attracting more users.

Key AR Features in Ionic Apps

Real-time Object Recognition: AR can instantly identify and interact with physical objects.

Spatial Mapping: AR creates a detailed map of the surrounding environment, enabling more accurate and immersive experiences.

Interactive User Interfaces: AR enhances user interfaces, making them more dynamic and interactive.

Tools and Technologies for AR in Ionic

Several tools and technologies are available for integrating AR into Ionic apps:

ARCore by Google: Brings advanced AR features to Android platforms.

ARKit by Apple: Offers AR features for iOS devices.

Vuforia and Other AR SDKs: Third-party SDKs that provide additional AR functionalities.

Setting Up an Ionic Project for AR Development

Installing Ionic: Begin by installing the Ionic CLI.

Setting up ARCore/ARKit: Integrate ARCore for Android or ARKit for iOS into your project.

Project Configuration: Configure your project to include necessary dependencies and settings for AR development.

Building Basic AR Functionality in Ionic

Creating an AR Scene: Set up the initial AR environment.

Adding AR Objects: Incorporate digital objects into the AR scene.

Implementing User Interactions: Enable interactions between users and AR elements.

Advanced AR Features in Ionic Apps

Marker-based AR: Uses specific images or objects as triggers for AR content.

Markerless AR: Does not rely on specific markers, allowing for more flexible and dynamic experiences.

Location-based AR: Leverages GPS data to place AR content according to the user's location.

Challenges in Developing AR with Ionic

Optimizing Performance: Prioritize seamless and responsive AR interactions.

Device Compatibility: Addressing variations in AR capabilities across different devices.

User Experience Design: Creating intuitive and user-friendly AR interfaces.

Best Practices for AR Development in Ionic

Testing and Debugging: Thoroughly test AR features to ensure reliability and performance.

Cross-Platform Compatibility: Ensure your AR app works seamlessly on both Android and iOS.

User-Centric Design: Focus on creating AR experiences that meet user needs and expectations.

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Future Trends of AR in IonFAQsic Apps

The potential for AR in app development is More:

Emerging Technologies: Stay updated with the latest AR tools and frameworks.

Innovative Features: Anticipate new AR capabilities that can enhance app experiences.

AR's Future: Delve into how AR will continually transform mobile app development.

Conclusion

Augmented Reality in Ionic apps offers unparalleled opportunities to create engaging and immersive user experiences. By leveraging the power of AR, developers can build innovative applications that stand out in the competitive app market. With continuous advancements in AR technology, the future of AR in Ionic apps is bright, promising even more exciting developments.

1. How do AR and VR differ?AR integrates digital content with the real world, while VR immerses users in a completely virtual environment.

2. In what ways can AR improve user experiences in apps?AR delivers interactive and immersive experiences, significantly boosting user interaction and satisfaction in apps.

3. What are the key tools for AR development in Ionic? Key tools include ARCore for Android, ARKit for iOS, and third-party SDKs like Vuforia.

4. What are the common challenges in AR development? Challenges include performance optimization, device compatibility, and user experience design.5. How can I get started with AR development in Ionic? Start by installing Ionic, setting up ARCore/ARKit, and configuring your project for AR development.

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How to Learn iOS App Development: Start With These Courses and Tutorials

Ever since the catch phrase “There’s an app for that” played on a television commercial, there’s been a strong and growing interest in creating mobile apps, especially for Apple and iOS devices. Mobile apps are used by hundreds of millions of users per day, with more than 100 million iPhone users estimated to exist in the United States alone.

As a developer, this has come with its own set of positives and negatives. Developing for several mobile platforms can be a pain, but if you’re looking to deploy across Android, Apple, and others, frameworks such as React Native and Ionic exist to lighten the load.

However, for a cutting-edge, top quality iOS app, there's no substitute for native development in Swift. If you're looking to work directly with iOS, then this guide is for you! If you want to learn about cross-device development, then take a look at our How to Learn React Native and How to Learn Ionic guides.

React Native

How to Learn React Native: Start With These Courses and Tutorials

Kyle Sloka-Frey

Ionic

How to Learn Ionic: Start With These Courses and Tutorials

Kyle Sloka-Frey

In this post, I'll cover some of the best courses and tutorials available through Envato right now, and how they can boost your iOS app development skills each step of the way.

Developing Apps for iOS

Years ago, developing applications for iOS was difficult, requiring several interlocking frameworks and languages to complete your project, primarily Objective-C and Cocoa. In 2014 though, Apple released the Swift programming language, which helped to encapsulate the large amount of code that already existed for creating apps, but transformed it into a much easier to learn and implement language.

Swift covers more than just iOS programming though, allowing you to create projects for many of Apple’s other operating systems, including MacOS, iOS, watchOS, and a few others.

If you’re brand new to iOS development, you’ll need to learn some basics first before getting started. Mostly you’ll need a Mac to develop on, and you’ll need an Apple developer account (but only when you get to the point of launching an app).

With that out of the way, let’s dig into the first part of learning iOS app development.

Prerequisites for Building iOS Apps

When learning to build iOS apps, one thing that makes it easy to get started is that most of the learning is focused around a single language: Swift. Those already familiar with another programming language will be able to get up to speed with Swift quickly (especially if you’re experienced in JavaScript).

If you’re just getting started with Swift though, you’ll want to get a base-level understanding of the language before using it to build an app.

The tutorial series Swift from Scratch will help to put all of the basics of the Swift programming language under your belt, and you can also use the official Swift documentation as a resource to look to if you run into any problems.

Here’s some of the more crucial tutorials you should check out in the Swift from Scratch series:

Swift From Scratch: Introduction

In this series, you'll learn everything you need to know about Swift 3 to get up and running. You'll start with the very basics to get your feet wet and...

Bart Jacobs

20 Jan 2017

Swift

Swift From Scratch: Variables and Constants

In the first article of Swift From Scratch, you learned about Xcode playgrounds and wrote your first lines of Swift. In this article, we'll start learning...

Bart Jacobs

27 Jan 2017

Swift

Swift From Scratch: Collections and Tuples

In the previous article, you learned about variables, constants, and some of the common data types, such as integers, floats, and strings. In this article,...

Bart Jacobs

20 Feb 2017

Swift

Swift From Scratch: Optionals and Control Flow

In the previous articles, you learned some of the basic concepts of the Swift programming language. If you've programmed before, I'm sure you saw a few...

Bart Jacobs

23 Feb 2017

Swift

Swift From Scratch: An Introduction to Functions

To get anything done in Swift, you need to learn the ins and outs of functions. Functions are exceptionally powerful and flexible in Swift. The basics are...

Bart Jacobs

10 Mar 2017

Swift

Swift From Scratch: Function Parameters, Types, and Nesting

In the previous article, we explored the basics of functions in Swift. Functions, however, have a lot more to offer. In this article, we continue our...

Bart Jacobs

15 Mar 2017

Swift

Once you’ve got enough Swift down, it’s time to move onto working with iOS apps themselves.

iOS Application Basics

Working with Swift doesn’t differ too far from creating iOS applications, after all, Swift is a programming language specifically for dealing with Apple platforms. To get down the basics of developing iOS apps, we’ll have to delve a little further into swift, before getting to the creation of simple applications.

With a general understanding of Swift under your belt, next you should learn more about Swift Design Patterns. Understanding some of the core design patterns in Swift will help you to solve common issues, build reusable bits of code, and help to keep your applications looking sharp.

Design Patterns

Swift Design Patterns

Derek Jensen

After looking at the design patterns, follow this course on Building an iOS App With Swift. Within the course, you’ll recap some of the basics of Swift, while also talking about how to use XCode and walking through the entire process of building a simple app.

Swift

Create iOS Apps With Swift

Markus Mühlberger

At this point, you’ll have built a fully functional application for iOS. Next up, we’ll look at expanding into creating and understanding more advanced apps.

Intermediate Courses and Tutorials About iOS

You’ve followed a course by this point that helped you put together a basic app, or maybe you’ve built your own simple apps before. Now it’s time to expand on that. There are thousands of different features and functions that could be a part of any app, and learning them from the ground up can be difficult.

We’ll start with a look at some existing app templates with already functioning code. Hopefully using this working code and the documentation available with it, we can quickly learn how to implement a variety of features, and just as importantly, the underlying styles that will help to build our own.

One of the highest rated app templates to start with is Universal for iOS. This template is a beast, covering a ton of common features such as ad displays, timelines, in-app purchases, social connections, and more. It’s a complex app, which can be daunting just because of the sheer amount of things it can do. Luckily, this app is structured well, so you can find the areas you want to research easily.

Once you’ve explored some of the core features present in applications, next is to check out some more niche templates for less general functions. You might have a specific app or industry in mind, so finding a template that’s similar to what you’re looking to build can really give you a leg up for completing more specific functions.

We keep an updated list of 15 of the best Swift templates, where you can get a look at some of the best rated app templates for a variety of different uses.

App Templates

15 Best Swift App Templates

Franc Lucas

Pick out one or two that fall into a similar vein of what you want to do, and check them out. Look at each screen that you might want to use in the future, and try to isolate the features that you think are important. Taking features from an app template and moving them into your own app can be a great way to learn about each of these pieces and how the interact with the rest of your application.

Advanced iOS Development

At this point, you’re getting pretty good at developing using Swift. Most applications are within your realm of knowledge, and now it’s time to delve into the more advanced cases. There are a ton of interesting things you can do on an iOS system that fall into this category, but we’ll cover a handful of the more interesting ones available.

First up is a course that helps you dabble in a variety of advanced topics, including animations, networking, and custom controls. You can check out Go Further with Swift to get started in each of those areas.

iOS

Go Further With Swift: Animation, Networking, and Custom Controls

Markus Mühlberger

If you want to look at something more cutting edge, the course Get Started with Augmented Reality for iOS is a good course to start. Covering a 3D topics, lighting, and advanced UI concepts, you’ll be ready to create your own augmented reality apps when finished.

iOS

Get Started With Augmented Reality for iOS

Markus Mühlberger

You could even follow the tutorial Train a Text Classification Model with Create ML to discover how to combine Swift with Create ML to build your own Machine Learning models.

Machine Learning

Train a Text Classification Model With Create ML

Vardhan Agrawal

Finally, if you’re looking to make your code cleaner and easier to understand, check out this article on refactoring your Swift code to see some of the ways that you can improve your code quality.

Swift

8 New Ways to Refactor Your Code With Swift 4

Doron Katz

How Did You Get Started in iOS Development?

After making your way through these courses and tutorials, you should be a pretty substantial Swift developer! Keep up the learning though, there’s always new features coming out to conquer. Take a look around at the other Envato courses and tutorials, or check out some of the other great resources available for iOS app development on the web.

How did you learn Swift or iOS development? Let me know about some of your favorite resources or the path you took in the comments below!

Premium iOS App Templates from CodeCanyon

CodeCanyon is an online marketplace that has hundreds of app templates, which make it easy to get started coding any kind of iOS app. They're a great way to learn how to code iOS apps, and if you're a professional coder, they're a great way to jumpstart your next app project.

If you have trouble deciding which template on CodeCanyon is right for you, these articles should help: 

iOS SDK

Jump-Start Your Mobile App With an iOS App Template

Franc Lucas

iOS SDK

17 Best iOS App Templates of 2019

Nona Blackman

App Templates

10 Best iOS Photo App Templates

Franc Lucas

App Templates

15 Best Swift App Templates

Franc Lucas

by Kyle Sloka-Frey via Envato Tuts+ Code https://ift.tt/37rW0zp

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Global revenues for mobile applications are anticipated to increase by a staggering 962.5% by 2017. With the increase of use of mobile applications on smartphones it will soon be converted into a $100 billion USD by the end of 2020. Rapid development in technology is responsible for evolution of mobile applications into a global phenomenon. Here are some of the latest trends that the largest fraternity of mobile phone users can look forward to.

GPS-based Apps: Augmented reality or AR in games is the latest trend. The demand for location-tracking functionality of smartphones has increased thus making such apps popular among users. AR has become extremely beneficial to those who are creating 3D games nowadays.

Progressive Hybrid Technologies: Progressive hybrid technologies will become powerful and will develop rapidly with the use of tools like Angular JS, Ionic, Cordova and PhoneGap. These will be used for agile hybrid app development projects. BYOD or bring your own device is a recent phenomenon which contributes a lot towards the development and acceptance of hybrid. According to prediction, mobile enterprise apps will have a high demand and there will be a challenge for the developers to accept it.

Focus on Mobile App Designing: The success of a mobile application depends on how user-friendly the interface is. Graphic artists, illustrators and animators are being hired by every company to draw public attention towards the design of the app. Visuals, micro interactions, parallax, grid-based interface designing and split-screens are going to be some of the path breaking trends to look forward to.

Big Data Turning Big: Big applications are turning out to be really big in terms of significance by combining user-friendliness in interfaces, reliability and also improved functionality. We will not have to wait for long to witness cutting-edge mobile app development that combine IoT, big data processing features and also cloud connectivity.

Enterprise App Taking Lead: Communication has been made easier by these apps as they are capable of maintaining steady connection with existing and potential clients. With the customization facility, daily business management activities have also been rendered easy. CRM mobile app is a great example to pull up customer info promptly which makes operation easy for senior management.

Internet of Things: IoT has really risen in a bigger way than everybody expected. It has also grown in revenue generation and profit making and is expected to take long strides in terms of integration and profit making by 2017. This seemed almost a decade ago but now it has become a reality. IoT has been implemented to a wide range of industries from health care to transportation to security.

Security is Taken Seriously: Security threats have increased manifold with the use of Internet in everything visible. Security measures like 2 step user authentication which is used particularly for mobile banking app has become commonplace. This is the reason why developers are being asked to have a powerful security measure in place. iOS have always had great security but Android suffers on this aspect. Nevertheless, Google is trying to use automatic security updates as well as granular app permission.

Instant Apps are the Future: Instant apps do exactly what they think- they make the apps run instantly. These apps do not require downloading or installing on a particular device. This enables users to access a wide range of apps seamlessly. For instance, when a user is being sent a single link from a friend, he/she can open it with single tap. This aids the users in utilizing particular feature from the app without installing it on the device. This year more such apps which will run based on the users’ demand will be released providing users a more personal experience. However, these are only Android friendly.

These are some of the mobile application development trends for the year 2017 which the users and also the developers are looking forward to. These trends are important ones and according to prediction will take shape in the years to come. However, companies are trying to adapt themselves to the changing demands of consumer behavior. Attention span of users has shortened dramatically thus leading to development of new apps which are helping more people to achieve a life of prosperity.

Source by Rony Sneijder

The post Mobile Application Development Trends For Years To Come appeared first on Fadsmedia.

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Augmented Reality in an Ionic/Angular PWA

Recently, I published a tutorial on using ThreeJS with Ionic to embed virtual reality content into a mobile application using WebVR. This tutorial is going to be somewhat similar, we will still be making use of ThreeJS and WebGL, but we will be creating an augmented reality experience in an Ionic/Angular application.

If you are unfamiliar with technologies like WebGL (which uses the GPU of a device to render 3D graphics on the web) and ThreeJS (a framework that makes using WebGL easier) it might be beneficial to read the previous article about WebVR first.

Introduction to Augmented Reality

Put simply, augmented reality uses technology to “virtually” change a real physical space. Unlike virtual reality which throws you into a fully artificial/simulated world, augmented reality adds to an existing space. Although an augmented reality experience isn’t limited to just the use of a camera, most AR projects available today involve using your device’s camera to view a physical space, and additional objects will be added to that space on the screen – your device acts as a “window” into the augmented space.

This technology is still in its infancy, and I don’t think this is something people are really using in their day-to-day lives, but there are a few interesting examples out there already. Many people would have seen the use of augmented reality to add Pokémon to a real physical space in Pokémon GO which is a bit of fun, but then there are also projects like Google Lens which allows you find out more information about particular objects by using your device’s camera.

Web vs Native Augmented Reality

Apple are working on developing ARKit for native iOS applications, and Google are working on ARCore for native Android applications which will allow developers to provide augmented reality experiences in iOS and Android applications.

If you are building your Ionic applications with Cordova or Capacitor, then you can still access these Native APIs. Although comparisons are often framed as “native or hybrid”, it is important to note that when you build an Ionic application for iOS or Android it is a native application like any other – the difference is that “hybrid” applications use an embedded browser to display the web-powered user interface for the application. An application built with Ionic still has all the native tools that any other application has access to available to it, and that includes the ability to launch native views that use ARKit or ARCore.

We are talking about embedding dynamic 3D objects into a physical space in real-time here, so for experiences on the higher end of the spectrum, you are probably going to want to use these Native APIs. However, it is still entirely possible to create an augmented reality experience purely using web tech (just good old HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) – that includes integration with the camera and the rendering of 3D objects.

A downside of using Native APIs to provide an augmented reality experience is that it is platform specific. One of the big draws of Ionic and the web is that you can code an application once that will work everywhere. When you deviate away from the web and into platform-specific native integrations, you lose some of that portability.

The other benefit to using a web-based AR approach is that if you want to integrate the experience into the interface of an Ionic application, as opposed to just launching a full-screen native view, you will more easily be able to integrate a web-based AR approach with Ionic’s web-based UI. It is possible to mix native views with web UI, but unless it is just an overlay it can get messy (which is why I generally favour the web-based Google Maps JavaScript SDK over the Native SDK).

Whilst you’re probably not going to be building something like this using Web AR:

(although to be fair, this could be possible with WebAR for all I know)

There are still uses cases for a fully web-based AR experience, and since this tech is still in its infancy this is sure to grow in the future.

Building an Augmented Reality Experience in Ionic

In this tutorial, we are going to walk through an example of projecting a 3D ThreeJS scene built with A-Frame right into real life through your device’s camera. This will run completely through the web. We will be able to deploy this application as a PWA (Progressive Web Application) and access it directly through a devices web browser to activate the augmented reality functionality (assuming the device has a camera, of course).

We will be using a package called AR.js which was created by Jerome Etienne, which makes it absurdly easy to get an augmented reality experience up and running. You can literally just dump this 10 line example from the documentation into a web page:

<!doctype HTML> <html> <script src="https://aframe.io/releases/0.6.1/aframe.min.js"></script> <script src="https://cdn.rawgit.com/jeromeetienne/AR.js/1.5.0/aframe/build/aframe-ar.js"> </script> <body style='margin : 0px; overflow: hidden;'> <a-scene embedded arjs> <a-marker preset="hiro"> <a-box position='0 0.5 0' material='color: black;'></a-box> </a-marker> <a-entity camera></a-entity> </a-scene> </body> </html>

and you have a working demo. This demo (and the example we will be building) relies on using a marker image like this. You simply point your camera at the marker image and the 3D object or objects will be projected there. You can just display the image on your computer, phone, or you could print it out on paper if you like.

What we will be focusing on in this tutorial is how to get a similar example working well in an Ionic/Angular environment. When we are done, we will have something that looks like this:

You can view this demo directly yourself by clicking here. You don’t even need to be on your phone, if your computer has a webcam then it should run through that as well.

Create the 3D Scene

We can create the 3D scene that we want to display in augmented reality using A-Frame – which is basically a framework that makes using ThreeJS easier (which is a framework that makes using WebGL easier). A-Frame allows us to use simple HTML syntax to embed 3D objects into a scene. I will likely post a more in-depth tutorial about A-Frame in the future, but for now, we are just going to use it for a simple example.

We can trigger the behaviour of AR.js by adding the arjs attribute to the A-Frame scene, but it is important to note that it will attach its functionality to the <body> tag of the page. This makes it a little difficult to just add an A-Frame scene to one of the page’s templates in our Ionic/Angular application because it isn’t going to play nicely with the rest of the application.

This makes using an <iframe> an attractive option because we can just load our scene directly into the <iframe> and we can embed the frame wherever we need it in the application. We can just create a standard HTML file and save it as a local asset for the application, then we can just load that directly into the IFrame. We are going to create an example that is almost identical to the demo code – we are just going to tweak a couple of things so we have some more interesting objects.

Save the following file as aframe-ar.html in your assets folder

<!doctype HTML> <html> <script src="https://aframe.io/releases/0.6.1/aframe.min.js"></script> <script src="https://cdn.rawgit.com/jeromeetienne/AR.js/1.5.0/aframe/build/aframe-ar.js"> </script> <body style='margin : 0px; overflow: hidden;'> <a-scene embedded arjs> <a-marker preset="hiro"> <a-box position="-1 0.5 0" rotation="0 45 0" color="#4CC3D9"></a-box> <a-plane position="0 0 0" rotation="-90 0 0" width="4" height="4" color="#7BC8A4"></a-plane> </a-marker> <a-entity camera></a-entity> </a-scene> </body> </html>

This will create a simple 3D scene with a plane positioned at the bottom, and a box that is sitting on top of it. The AR functionality is completely self-contained in this frame, so there is no need to install or make any modifications to the Ionic/Angular application. All we will need to do is embed the IFrame somewhere.

Add the IFrame

You can embed the IFrame anywhere you like in your Ionic/Angular application (just make sure that you supply your static .html file from the assets folder as the src for the IFrame), but you will probably want to add a few styles to make it display more nicely (just add this to whatever component you are displaying the frame in):

iframe { position: absolute; width: 100%; height: 100%; border: none; }

For the example application, I created an ARLauncherPage that I launched as a modal to trigger the AR functionality:

ar-launcher.page.html

<ion-header> <ion-toolbar> <ion-title>ARLauncher</ion-title> <ion-buttons slot="end"> <ion-button (click)="close()"><ion-icon name="close" slot="icon-only"></ion-icon></ion-button> </ion-buttons> </ion-toolbar> </ion-header> <ion-content> <iframe src="/assets/aframe-ar.html"></iframe> </ion-content>

ar-launcher.page.ts

import { Component, OnInit, ViewEncapsulation } from '@angular/core'; import { ModalController } from '@ionic/angular'; @Component({ selector: 'app-ar-launcher', templateUrl: './ar-launcher.page.html', styleUrls: ['./ar-launcher.page.scss'], encapsulation: ViewEncapsulation.None }) export class ARLauncherPage implements OnInit { constructor(private modalCtrl: ModalController) { } ngOnInit() { } close(){ this.modalCtrl.dismiss(); } }

Deploy to the Web

The cool thing about AR.js is that it runs entirely with web tech, there is absolutely no native integration required which means we can just run it directly on the web (you could also deploy it as a native application if you wanted to).

If you would like to set the application up as a PWA (you don’t have to) you can follow the steps in this tutorial. Once you are ready to host it on the web, you can follow this tutorial to get it set up with Firebase Hosting (or you could host it wherever you prefer).

Summary

With your application hosted, all you need to do is go to the URL, launch the page that contains the AR functionality, and point your camera at the marker image.

Whilst AR.js – and augmented reality on the web in general – is still under development, it is exciting to see the kinds of things we are already able to do with the web today.

via joshmorony – Learn Ionic & Build Mobile Apps with Web Tech https://ift.tt/2MaPYbH

[grey-space-computing]

Discover how Augmented Reality (AR) in Ionic Apps is transforming user experiences! Dive into our latest blog post to learn about implementing AR in your Ionic app, best practices, and the incredible benefits it brings to user engagement. Whether you're a developer or a tech enthusiast, this guide will show you how to create immersive and interactive mobile apps.

Check it out now and elevate your app development game! 🌟

🔗 Read the full article https://greyspacecomputing.com/augmented-reality-in-ionic-apps/