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

Understanding the OBJ file format


The goal of this project is to view 3D models in the Wavefront OBJ format. Before we begin coding, let's take a look at the file format. A reference can be found at http://www.fileformat.info/format/wavefrontobj/egff.htm.

As we know, 3D models can be represented as a mesh of X, Y, and Z vertices. Sets of vertices are connected to define a face of the mesh surface. A full mesh surface is a collection of these faces.

Each vertex can also be assigned a normal vector and/or a texture coordinate. The normal vector defines the outward facing direction at that vertex, used in lighting calculations. The UV texture coordinate can be used to map texture images onto the mesh surface. There are other features of the format, including free-form curves and materials, which we will not support in this project.

As a plain text file, an OBJ is organized as separate lines of text. Each nonblank line begins with a keyword and data for that keyword separated by spaces. Comments...