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

Onward to the future


We hope you've enjoyed this introduction to and journey through Cardboard virtual reality development for Android. Throughout this book, we have explored the Google Cardboard Java SDK, OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics, and Android development in general. We touched on a number of VR best practices and saw the limitations of low-level graphics development on a mobile platform. Still, if you followed along, you've succeeded in implementing a reasonable general purpose library for 3D graphics and VR development. You created a wide variety of VR applications, including an app launcher, a Solar System simulation, a 360-degree media gallery, a 3D model viewer, and music visualizers.

Naturally, we expect the Cardboard Java SDK to change, evolve, and mature from this point forward. No one really knows what the future holds, perhaps not even Google. Yet here we are, at the precipice of a bold new future. The best way to predict the future is to help invent it. Now it's your turn!