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

Adding an icon to the view


Next, we'll add an icon image to the view.

For now, let's just use a generic icon, such as android_robot.png. A copy of this can be found on the Internet, and there's a copy included with the files for this chapter. Paste the android_robot.png file into your project's app/res/drawable/ folder. Don't worry, we'll be using the actual app icons later.

We want to display both the text and an icon together, so we can add the code in order to add the image views to the addContent method.

In the onCreate method of MainActivity, modify the addContent call to pass the icon as a second parameter:

        Drawable icon = getResources()
            .getDrawable(R.drawable.android_robot, null);
        overlayView.addContent("Hello Virtual World!", icon);

In addContent of OverlayView, add the icon parameter and pass it to the OverlayEye views:

    public void addContent(String text, Drawable icon) {
        leftEye.addContent(text, icon);
        rightEye.addContent(text, icon);...