Book Image

Cardboard VR Projects for Android

By : Jonathan Linowes, Matt Schoen
Book Image

Cardboard VR Projects for Android

By: Jonathan Linowes, Matt Schoen

Overview of this book

Google Cardboard is a low-cost, entry-level media platform through which you can experience virtual reality and virtual 3D environments. Its applications are as broad and varied as mobile smartphone applications themselves. This book will educate you on the best practices and methodology needed to build effective, stable, and performant mobile VR applications. In this book, we begin by defining virtual reality (VR) and how Google Cardboard fits into the larger VR and Android ecosystem. We introduce the underlying scientific and technical principles behind VR, including geometry, optics, rendering, and mobile software architecture. We start with a simple example app that ensures your environment is properly set up to write, build, and run the app. Then we develop a reusable VR graphics engine that you can build upon. And from then on, each chapter is a self-contained project where you will build an example from a different genre of application, including a 360 degree photo viewer, an educational simulation of our solar system, a 3D model viewer, and a music visualizer. Given the recent updates that were rolled out at Google I/O 2016, the authors of Cardboard VR Projects for Android have collated some technical notes to help you execute the projects in this book with Google VR Cardboard Java SDK 0.8, released in May 2016. Refer to the article at https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/GoogleVRUpdateGuideforCardbook.pdf which explains the updates to the source code of the projects.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Cardboard VR Projects for Android
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Adding the Cardboard Java SDK


Now's a good time to add the Cardboard SDK library .aar files to your project. For the basic projects in this book the libraries you need (at the time of writing v0.7) are:

  • common.aar

  • core.aar

Note

Note the SDK includes additional libraries that we do not use in the projects in this book but could be useful for your projects. The audio.aar file is for spatialized audio support. The panowidget and videowidget libraries are meant for 2D apps that want to drop-into VR for things such as viewing a 360-degree image or video.

At the time of writing, to obtain the Cardboard Android SDK client libraries, you can clone the cardboard-java GitHub repository, as explained on the Google Developers Cardboard Getting Started page, Start your own project topic at https://developers.google.com/cardboard/android/get-started#start_your_own_project. Clone the cardboard-java GitHub repository by running the following command:

git clone https://github.com/googlesamples/cardboard-java...