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

A solid color lighted sphere


We are going to start by rendering our sphere in a solid color but with lighted shading. As usual, we start by writing the shader functions that, among other things, define the program variables they will need from the Material that uses it. Then, we'll define the SolidColorLightingMaterial class and add it to the Sphere component.

Solid color lighting shaders

In the previous chapters, where we used shaders with lighting, we did the lighting calculations in the vertex shader. That's simpler (and faster), but transitioning the calculations to the fragment shader yields better results. The reason is that, in the vertex shader, you only have one normal value to compare against the light direction. In the fragment, all vertex attributes are interpolated, meaning that the normal value at a given point between two vertices will be some point in between their two normals. When this is the case, you see a smooth gradient across the triangle face, rather than localized...