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

Vertex color lighting material and shaders


This next topic gets a bit complicated. We're going to write new vertex and fragment shaders that handle lighting and write a corresponding class extending Material that makes use of them. Don't worry though, we've already done this once before. We're just going to actually explain it this time.

Let's dive right into it. Locate the res/raw/ folder. Then, for each file, right-click on it, and go to New | File to create new files.

File: res/raw/vertex_color_lighting_vertex.shader

uniform mat4 u_Model;
uniform mat4 u_MVP;
uniform mat4 u_MVMatrix;
uniform vec3 u_LightPos;

attribute vec4 a_Position;
attribute vec4 a_Color;
attribute vec3 a_Normal;

varying vec4 v_Color;

const float ONE = 1.0;
const float COEFF = 0.00001;

void main() {
    vec3 modelViewVertex = vec3(u_MVMatrix * a_Position);
    vec3 modelViewNormal = vec3(u_MVMatrix * vec4(a_Normal, 0.0));

    float distance = length(u_LightPos - modelViewVertex);
    vec3 lightVector = normalize...