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

I'm a little teapot


For decades, 3D computer graphics researchers and developers have used this cute model of a teapot. It's a classic! The back story is that Martin Newell, the famous computer graphics pioneer and researcher, needed a model for his work, and his wife suggested that he model their teapot at home. The original is now on display at the Boston Computer Museum. We have included an OBJ version of this classic model with the downloadable files for this book.

Of course, you can choose your own OBJ file, but if you want to use the teapot, locate the teapot.obj file, and copy it to the res/raw folder (create the folder if necessary).

Now load the model and try it. In MainActivity, add a variable at the top of the MainActivity class to hold the current model:

    Transform model;

Add the following code to the setup method. Notice that we're scaling it to a fraction of the original size and placing it 3 units in front of the camera:

    public void setup() {
        ModelObject modelObj...