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

Practical and production ready


Note that, as mentioned earlier, we've created a limited implementation of the OBJ model format, so not every model that you find will view correctly (if at all) at this point. Then again, it might be sufficient, depending on the requirements of your own projects, for example, if you include specific models in the resource folder that can be viewed in the released version of your app. When you have complete control of the input data, you can cut corners.

While the basic structure of the OBJ file format is not very complicated, as we've demonstrated here, like many things in software (and in life) "the devil is in the details." Using this project as a starting point, and then building your own practical and production-ready OBJ file parser and renderer will require a considerable amount of additional work. You might also do some research on pre-existing packages, other model formats, or maybe even lifting some code from an open-source game engine like LibGDX...