UFO project overview

Explore the Unity project

Begin the AR port

Selecting an orientation for your AR game

Enable the play area

Develop the AR UFO movement

Develop the AR UFO abduction action

Other AR considerations

Design your own AR app

In this Mission, you’ll port an existing desktop game to mobile and redesign it to be a fully functioning (and fun!) AR experience.

Research future AR use cases to prepare for developing new kinds of applications

Evaluate platform capabilities and limitations in order to determine whether or not a given feature will work

Absolute Beginner AR Design

Absolute Beginner AR Development

Optimize assets and application to meet mobile performance standards

Beginner Mobile Optimization

Create basic application interactions with Visual Scripting

Absolute Beginner Visual Scripting

In this learning experience, you’ll port an existing desktop game to mobile and redesign it to be a fully functioning (and fun!) AR experience. You’ll conduct research, create a design document, modify visual scripts, and regularly playtest your app. At the conclusion of this project, you’ll also design and create your own fully realized AR application.

AR experience design

Mobile AR Development

Mobile AR Development - Unity Learn

Ready to create AR experiences? In this learning pathway, you’ll develop AR apps compatible with iOS and Android devices!

Evaluate platform capabilities and limitations in order to determine whether or not a given feature will work.

Develop AR experiences that use trackable targets in the environment

Welcome to AR Development! In this learning Pathway, you'll create Augmented Reality (AR) applications that are compatible with iOS and Android devices. You’ll use Visual Scripting and Unity’s AR tools to develop a wide variety of engaging AR experiences. This pathway assumes a basic knowledge of Unity.

Welcome to AR Development

test

Configure your AR development environment

Deploy your project to iOS or Android

Welcome to AR Development Quiz

Get ready for AR development: explore the field, hear from experts, install essential software, set up a Unity project, and deploy a test project to your mobile device.

In these tutorials, you'll get ready for AR development. First, you'll learn about the field of AR and hear from established creators in the AR industry. Next, you'll download all required software to get started and configure a Unity project for AR development. Finally, you'll deploy a test project to your mobile device to make sure everything is working as it should.

Get started with AR

Set up a face tracking project

Add a face texture

Add accessories to your filter

Add animations to your filter

Add particle effects to your filter

Add post-processing to your filter

Submission: Ice cream company filter

Learn how to create a custom face filter app with fun textures, 3D models, particles, and effects. In the challenge, design a themed filter for an ice cream company.

In this mission you'll create your own custom face filter app that includes a wide variety of digital content. The face filter will include interesting textures, animated 3D models, dynamic particles, and post-processing effects. You'll also complete a challenge where you design a custom filter for an ice cream shop.

Create a basic face filter

Build a new scene with glasses

Set up the UI

Create a visual script to detect a button press

Turn on the glasses with buttons

Update your graph to switch between glasses

Configure one color button

Complete the color switching functionality

Save and load the glasses

Submission: Ocean-themed face filter

Create with AR: Face Filters Quiz

Expand on what you’ve learned with filters that add interactive elements. You’ll create an app for customizing and trying on glasses, then an ocean-themed face filter.

Now that you’ve created a basic face filter, you’re ready to develop your skills and work on a filter that involves interactivity. In this project, you will create your own interactive app that allows a user to select, customize, and visualize different pairs of glasses on their face.You will also complete a challenge where you design an interactive underwater scuba filter for an aquarium.

Create an interactive face filter

Create a new project for marker-based AR

Spawn an object on an AR Marker

Add a UI with rotation buttons

Add world space UI to your marker-based app 

Add spatial audio to your marker-based app

Submission: Bring art to life with AR

Add world space UI to your marker-based app

Learn to create marker-based AR apps, which make digital models appear over marker images in the real world. In the challenge, you’ll breathe life into a 2D work of art.

 app is an application that can recognize images (called markers) in the real world and then make content appear in the app. You may have seen applications that use this kind of technology to make AR content for movie posters, product labels, card games, and even business cards.

In this project, you’ll make a marker-based app with a user interface that lets the user control a 3D model, text, and audio.

Create a marker-based AR app

Set up a scene with plane detection

Detect the user’s touch

Detect when the user touches a plane

Instantiate the portal on a plane

Test the frame rate of the portal world

Limit the visibility of the portal world

Submission: AR friend

Create with AR: markers and planes Quiz

Make an app that detects flat surfaces and allows the user to spawn a portal on their floor or wall. Then complete a challenge to create an interactive character app.

In this project, you’ll create an AR app that makes use of plane detection technology. iOS and Android devices have the ability to detect flat surfaces — or planes — in your physical environment. This includes horizontal planes like the floor or a table, and vertical planes like the walls. 

You will create an app where the user will be able to tap on a plane in order to place a portal onto it. This portal will be a window into a virtual 3D environment that the user can peer into and explore. 

You will also complete a challenge where you design an app that allows the user to place a character on a table and interact with it.

Create a plane detection AR app

5320b0ea-3ff7-48d0-8a42-53b91a6fe383:ce423f86a47a

Overview

Evaluate UI options for the UFO movement

Review the UFO Movement Script Machine

Create a worldspace UI

Reconfigure movement for buttons

More things to try 

Next steps

Zu-UnityLearn

AR-3.6-10-right-button-demo.mp4

AR-3.6-13-move-buttons-working.mp4

Krystal Kart AR

KnightFall AR

AR-3.6-16-move-sound_1.mp4

The desktop version of the game uses the keyboard to move the UFO around in the play area. However, this isn’t the best solution for the mobile version of the game, so you need to create a new way to interact with the UFO.

In this tutorial you will do the following:

Create an AR-friendly movement control scheme for mobile devices

Modify the existing visual script to use your new control scheme

Build AR projects to mobile devices

As you adapt the UFO game to be an AR experience, you will need to rethink the way that the UFO moves.  In the desktop version, the UFO was controlled with the keyboard, but displaying the entire keyboard isn’t really a viable option for a mobile game — it would take up half the screen!

In this tutorial, you’ll explore  options for alternative controls and implement new UFO movement for the mobile AR game.

The mobile keyboard enabled in the app. It takes up over half of the visual space on the screen.

As with many challenges in creating digital experiences, there are different approaches that you can take as you redesign the UFO movement. You know the keyboard won’t work, so take a few minutes to explore how other AR experiences handle user input. 

Some AR experiences include screen space UI buttons, which remain on screen at all times at the same location, to allow the user movement control. The benefit of screen space buttons is that they will always be visible and accessible to the user, but the drawback is that they take up valuable screen space. Krystal Kart AR, a game where you drive a cart around an AR track, uses a screen space joystick.

Other AR experiences use worldspace UI elements, which include buttons or text that are located within the 3D AR scene. The benefit of worldspace buttons is that they can feel more integrated into the AR world, but a potential drawback is that they will change in position and perspective as you move around the AR scene and may not always be visible or accessible. Knightfall AR, for example, includes some worldspace UI elements. 

In addition to having actual buttons the user can press on the screen, there are other ways the user could control movement in an AR experience. Here are two examples:

The user could click and drag digital objects around the scene. You can see an example of this movement in Wayfair AR, where you can touch and drag furniture. 

The user could tap on an object or the location that the player should move. You can see an example of this in My AR Puppy, where you can play fetch with your puppy or have him walk towards a food bowl. 

The UFO Movement Script Machine handles all of the UFO’s movement in the game. Inside the Script Machine are four graphs, which manage left, right, forward and backward movement. 

Each of these graphs are functionally the same, with only two differences: 

The button that triggers the sequence (currently the W, A, S, or D keys) is different in each group.

The X or Z position value that limits how far the UFO can move in a given direction is different in each group.

You’ll notice that there are two values to detect keyboard input: one for On Keyboard Input: Action Down and one for On Keyboard Input: Action Up. These nodes feed into the Toggle Value node, which allows the graph to detect the complete button press action. 

When the key is down, the toggle is On and the UFO starts moving. When the key is up, the toggle is off and the UFO stops moving. 

The entirety of the movement input system is controlled by those On Keyboard Input nodes. Your job is to replace those nodes with something that is compatible with mobile AR.

The graph that controls the movement of the UFO.

The three nodes in the script graphs that will differ from graph to graph.

The On Keyboard event nodes that detect the A key down and up action.

In this tutorial, we will guide you through implementing a world space UI, with directional movement buttons on all four sides of the farm. 

This is probably the simplest and most intuitive movement option that also stays true to the original gameplay from the desktop version. However, if you want to implement an alternative movement system, you will have an opportunity to do that at the end of this tutorial!

Follow these instructions to create a worldspace UI to control your UFO: 

1.  In the Project window, navigate to the Prefabs folder. Click and drag the Gameplay prefab into the Hierarchy. 

2.  Create a new UI > Canvas GameObject as a child of the MeshParent GameObject. Name the UI Canvas “WorldspaceCanvas” or something similar. 

3.  In the Inspector window, find the Canvas component. Set the Render Mode to World Space. 

Important: The Inspector window will display a warning that states that a World Space Canvas needs to have an assigned camera to register UI events correctly. This Canvas is part of a prefab, so references to hierarchical cameras will be lost. You’ll need to keep this fact in mind and solve the issue in a script graph as you adjust the game.

4.  Position, scale and rotate the canvas so that it lays flat on the ground and is larger than the fenced-in farm area. For this example, the canvas's Height and Width were set to 30 and the Rotation X was set to 90.

5.  In the Hierarchy, create a new UI Button GameObject as a child of the WorldspaceCanvas. Rename the new button “LeftArrow”. 

6.  In the Inspector window, style the LeftArrow GameObject as desired. Customize the text by selecting the Font Asset, Font Size, and Font Style properties you think look best, and change the Source Image to a different sprite if desired.

7.  Duplicate the LeftArrow GameObject three times and rename each button for a different direction. 

8.  Position each direction button on the matching side of the play area. 

UI Arrow buttons added to the gameplay prefab.

A WorldspaceCanvas is added to the MeshParent child of the Gameplay prefab.

The canvas component set to World Space.  Note the warning about requiring a camera

The example worldspace UI arranged around the farm

The worldspace buttons applied in the scene

Regardless of your chosen button design, connecting the UFO movement to the correct buttons will be the same. You will begin by creating variables for each of your buttons and then connect them to corresponding directional movement using pointer events. Pointer events can detect when a UI element has been selected with a pointing device, such as a mouse click or finger tap. In this app the user’s finger is the pointer device. 

Watch the following video to see how to modify the UFOMovement visual script or follow the instructions below:

1.  In the Hierarchy, select the UFO GameObject. In the Inspector window, locate the UFOMovement script machine and select Edit Graph. 

2.  In the Blackboard, create four Object variables for your directional buttons, taking care to give them relevant names.

3.  In the Graph Editor, starting at the UFO right movement graph, delete both D-key On Keyboard Input Event nodes.

4.  Add a Get Variable node for your right directional button.

5.  Add an On Pointer Down Event node. This event is called when the user touches the screen. 

6.  Add an On Pointer Up Event node. This event is called when the user takes their finger off the screen.

7.  Connect the On Pointer Down output to the On input of the Toggle Value node.

8.  Connect the On Pointer Up output to the Off input of the Toggle Value node.

9.  Connect the right directional button Get Variable node to the input of both On Pointer Event nodes.

10.  Repeat this process with the remaining three buttons, taking care to match the button direction with the direction of the graph section. The forward and backward direction can be especially confusing, since “forward” could mean away from the player, but could also mean towards the front of the farm.

11.  To save the changes to the Gameplay prefab, select the Gameplay GameObject, then in the Inspector window select Overrides > Apply All. 

Important: You must apply the changes to your Gameplay prefab or you will lose the new functionality you just implemented when the prefab is spawned into the scene.  

11.  Build and test on your device. When you touch one of the world space directional buttons, the UFO should move in the correct direction. 

The modified right directional movement graph, adjusted so the UFO will move with the rightButton input.

Prefab changes are saved by selecting the Overrides > Apply All button.

If you want to further develop your skills, explore new concepts, or improve your project, check out some of the optional activities below. Each activity is identified as being either Easy, Medium, or Difficult so you know what level of difficulty to expect.

These activities are entirely optional, so if you’re not interested, no problem — just skip this step. 

We do recommend attempting at least one of them in order to get the most out of this learning experience, however. Good luck!

Easy - Make the back button easier to access

The button that moves the UFO towards the back of the farm is often obscured by the farm. Is there some other location that you could place this button so that it’s more easily accessed? Keep in mind that the whole point of an AR experience is for the user to be able to move around and view it from different angles in their environment — so make sure the user can still use the button in different positions around the play area. 

In this example, the button is raised a bit higher and angled towards the user for easier access.

Alternatively, you could make the buttons much wider and therefore easier to press from any angle. 

Medium - Add a sound or effect to the move buttons

On the desktop version of the game, it was much more obvious to know when you were moving the UFO, since you got the physical feedback of press on the keyboard. In this AR version, it is more difficult to know when a button is being pressed, since you don’t have any physical feedback. 

Is there an effect or sound you could add that would make this interaction more obvious to the user?

Congratulations! You now have a working Worldspace UI that your player can use to control the UFO’s movement for your AR game port, whether you have chosen a marker or plane-based approach. 

In the next tutorial you will adjust the UI so that the player can press a UI button to abduct the sheep. 

Develop the AR UFO movement

1. Overview

2. Evaluate UI options for the UFO movement

3. Review the UFO Movement Script Machine

4. Create a worldspace UI

5. Reconfigure movement for buttons

6. More things to try

7. Next steps

Complete this tutorial