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

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Overview

 Game overview

Open the desktop project in Unity

Play the game

Research other AR experiences

Add your initial ideas to a new document

Next steps

Zu-UnityLearn

Unite Berlin - AR Keynote Reel

AR-3.1-03-desktop-game-demo.mp4

VIDEO 3  - How is the AR industry changing over time (1)_1.mp4

In this learning experience, you’ll port an existing desktop game to your mobile device and redesign it to be a quality AR game. Before you start changing the game, it’s important to get a good understanding of how it exists in its current form.


In this tutorial you will do the following:

Download and explore the existing project

Games

UFO_Game_Desktop_Zip.zip

AR Experience Design (New)

In this project, you will put your AR experience design skills to the test. You will take an existing desktop game about aliens abducting sheep and adapt it for mobile AR. The process of taking an application that was designed for one platform and reworking it for another platform is called porting. 

When you port a project from one platform to another, there's a lot you need to consider. 

If the original platform and the new target platform are very similar (like porting from macOS to Windows), the port can be relatively simple. When the platforms are very different, for example porting a game from Windows to Nintendo Switch, the port process can be very complicated.

For example, the popular 2D Made With Unity game, Among Us was ported to VR and released as Among Us VR in 2022. Every asset and interaction needed to be completely redesigned for this port to be successful.

Porting is just one of many ways to create new content for the AR market. In the video below, established creators discuss what kinds of opportunities there are in the AR industry, and why being able to create many different types of projects is so important.

In this first tutorial, you will open the desktop version of the UFO game project, play the game, and note any obvious features that will need to be heavily adapted for mobile AR. 

An infographic illustrating the process of porting.

On the left is a a screenshot of the desktop version of Among Us. On the right is a screenshot of the VR version of Among Us.

Left image from Among Us press kit. RIght image from Among Us VR press kit.

Before you open the game in Unity and experience it yourself, go through the sections below to learn the basic gameplay, understand the backstory, and appreciate some of the concept artwork. 

The game you will port to AR is called Close Encounters of the Wool Kind. It is a relatively simple game. The player controls a UFO and attempts to abduct sheep from a field without the farmer noticing. If the farmer wakes up and catches you abducting sheep, you lose. If you successfully abduct all the sheep without the farmer noticing, you win! Watch the video below to see some of the gameplay. 

Nothing beats a snuggly, hand-knit sweater, and that’s doubly true in the cold of space! After years of studying humanity, aliens have learned how to knit, and they want to bring this calming pastime back to their homeworld. 

The only trouble is that there are no sheep on their alien planet, so the aliens can’t make yarn! In order to achieve their goals, an alien crew has been sent to Earth to find a flock of sheep to bring home. They located a farm with a very nice flock and have monitored the old farmer’s habits: he rises with the sun and goes to bed with the sun. What luck! The aliens just have to make a quick visit to the barn after sunset and the flock will be theirs!

On the night that the aliens arrive to get their prize, they discover that the farmer has broken his habit! Apparently his sheep were extra hungry today, because he’s brought them out after nightfall to have a midnight snack. Are the aliens’ plans ruined? Fortunately not!

It’s clear that the poor old farmer has never been out this late past his bedtime: he keeps falling asleep in the field! Instead of taking the sheep from the barn, the aliens can use their tractor beam to snatch the sheep straight from the field.

The number one rule for alienkind is to not allow humans to see them. So, to protect themselves, the aliens have turned on their cloaking technology, making the UFO mostly invisible. There’s a small problem though: the cloaking technology has to be switched off in order to use the tractor beam!

Now, abducting the sheep has become a game of tactical patience. The aliens must use the late hour to their advantage and wait for the old farmer to doze off and then abduct a sheep. If it looks like the farmer is going to wake up, the aliens can release the tractor beam to become cloaked once again. 

Once all the sheep are collected, the aliens can be on their way! They just can’t let the farmer catch sight of them!

Concept art for the farmer, sheep, and UFO.

The concept art for the barn and pasture where the game will take place.

An early graybox version of the game, used for rapid prototyping.

A screen capture of the farmer’s texture being created in Adobe® Substance Painter.

It’s time to open the desktop version of the game in Unity. Follow these instructions to download the project and open it in Unity: 

1.  Download the UFO_Game_Desktop_Zip file, then unzip or extract it.

2.  Locate the UFO_Game_Desktop_Project folder inside the zip folder and move it to a suitable location on your computer.

3.  Add the Unity project to the Unity Hub and open it. 

If you see a warning icon next to the Editor version of your project, that means you do not have the correct version of Unity installed. You need to install the specific required version of Unity — this may not be the latest LTS release. Select the warning icon for more information.

View of Unity Hub with warning icon present in the Editor Version column. 

The game is made up of four scenes: StartScene, MainScene, WinScene, and LoseScene. StartScene is the first scene the player encounters, so it’s where you should start if you want to have the full game experience. 

Follow these instructions to experience the game from start to finish:

1.   In the Project window, navigate to the Assets > Scenes folder. 

4.  During the game, use the WASD keys to move the UFO and hold the Spacebar to beam up a sheep. 

5.  To experience all game screens, make sure that you both win and lose the game at least once.

The StartScene opened and the Editor in Play mode.

There are a lot of creative, engaging ways to interact with AR content. Before you begin designing port of Close Encounters of the Wool Kind, you should seek inspiration from apps — and specifically games — that are leading the way in AR experience design. 

Do some online research right now, including downloading and experiencing some AR apps on your device. Take note of interesting interactions that could be relevant to your AR port. 

Here is a list of apps you may want to explore:

As you go through the following tutorials, you will need to record your ideas, list concerns, and sketch concepts.

Follow these instructions to create a dedicated document and write down some of your initial thoughts.

1.  Create a new text document and give it a title like “UFO Game Port - Design Document.”

2.  Add a new section called “Initial impressions.”

3.  Under the Initial impressions section, list the interactions from the UFO game that would be problematic in AR and need to be redesigned for your game port. 

To generate ideas, think through what each screen and interaction would be like if it were on a mobile device. Then, try to imagine which aspects of the application would be appropriate as AR experiences. 

You will have a lot of time later to think through the specifics of porting each gameplay element, but it is helpful to have these questions in mind now so you can begin brainstorming.

You have opened and experienced the desktop version of the UFO game, and you’ve done some initial brainstorming for how you might port this experience to mobile AR. 

In the next tutorial, you will examine the contents of the Unity project itself. You will need a deep understanding of how the assets, scenes, and scripts work together in order to successfully port the project.

UFO project overview

1. Overview

2. Game overview

3. Open the desktop project in Unity

4. Play the game

5. Research other AR experiences

6. Add your initial ideas to a new document

7. Next steps

Complete this tutorial