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

Gaze to load


We want to detect when the user looks at a thumbnail and highlight the image by changing its border color. If users move their gaze away from the thumbnail, it will unhighlight. When the user clicks on the Cardboard trigger, that image is loaded.

Gaze-based highlights

Fortunately, we implemented the isLooking detection in the RenderBox library at the end of Chapter 5, RenderBox Engine. If you remember, the technique determines whether the user is looking at the plane by checking whether the vector between the camera and the plane position is the same as the camera's view direction, within a threshold of tolerance.

We can use this in MainActivity. We'll write a selectObject helper method that checks whether any of the objects in the scene are selected and highlights them. First, let's declare some variables at the top of the MainActivity class. The selectedThumbnail object holds the currently selected thumbnail index. We define border colors for normal and selected states:

    final...