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

Showing/hiding the grid with tilt-up gestures


Back in the early days of Cardboard, you had one button. That was all. The one button and head tracking were the only ways for the user to interact with the app. And because the button was a nifty magnet thing, you couldn't even press and hold the one button. With Cardboard 2.0, the screen turned into the button, and we also realized that we could briefly take the box off of our face, tilt the phone up, put it back on, and interpret that as a gesture. Thus, a second input was born! At the time of writing, the sample Cardboard apps use this as a back gesture.

We will be using tilt-up to show and hide the grid and arrows so that you can fully immerse yourself in the selected photosphere. Since it's less work, we'll also let the user do this anytime, and not just while looking at photospheres. As with the vibration feedback, this is actually a pretty painless feature to add. Most of the hard work is done by an OrientationEventListener class.

At the...