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

Setting up the new project


To build this project, we're going to use our RenderBox library created in Chapter 5, RenderBox Engine. You can use yours, or grab a copy from the download files provided with this book or our GitHub repo (use the commit tagged after-ch6https://github.com/cardbookvr/renderboxlib/releases/tag/after-ch6). For a more detailed description of how to import the RenderBox library, refer to the final section, Using RenderBox in future projects, in Chapter 5, RenderBox Engine. To do this, perform the following steps:

  1. With Android Studio opened, create a new project. Let's name it Gallery360 and target Android 4.4 KitKat (API 19) with an Empty Activity.

  2. Create new modules for the renderbox, common, and core packages, using File | New Module | Import .JAR/.AAR Package.

  3. Set the modules as dependencies for the app, using File | Project Structure.

  4. Edit the build.gradle file as explained in Chapter 2, The Skeleton Cardboard Project, to compile against SDK 22.

  5. Update /res/layout/activity_main...