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

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Our thumbnail grid has 15 images. If your phone has more than 15 photos, you'll need to scroll through the list. For this project, we'll implement a simple mechanic to scroll the list up and down, using triangular scroll buttons.

Creating the Triangle component

Like other RenderObjects in our RenderBox, the Triangle component defines coordinates, normals, indices, and other data that describes a triangle. We create a constructor method that allocates buffers. Like the Plane component, we want to use the BorderMaterial class so that it can be highlighted when selected. And like the Plane component, it will determine when the user is looking at it. Without further ado, here's the code.

Create a new Java class file, Triangle.java, in the RenderBoxExt/components folder. We begin by declaring it extends RenderObject and by declaring the following variables:

public class Triangle extends RenderObject {

    /*
    Special triangle for border shader

    *   0/3 (0,1,0)/(0,1,0) (0...