Book Image

Unity Virtual Reality Projects

By : Jonathan Linowes
Book Image

Unity Virtual Reality Projects

By: Jonathan Linowes

Overview of this book

What is consumer “virtual reality�? Wearing a head-mounted display you view stereoscopic 3D scenes. You can look around by moving your head, and walk around using hand controls or motion sensors. You are engaged in a fully immersive experience. On the other hand, Unity is a powerful game development engine that provides a rich set of features such as visual lighting, materials, physics, audio, special effects, and animation for creating 2D and 3D games. Unity 5 has become the leading platform for building virtual reality games, applications and experiences for this new generation of consumer VR devices. Using a practical and project-based approach, this book will educate you about the specifics of virtual reality development in Unity. You will learn how to use Unity to develop VR applications which can be experienced with devices such as the Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard. We will then learn how to engage with virtual worlds from a third person and first person character point of view. Furthermore, you will explore the technical considerations especially important and possibly unique to VR. The projects in the book will demonstrate how to build a variety of VR experiences. You will be diving into the Unity 3D game engine via the interactive Unity Editor as well as C-Sharp programming. By the end of the book, you will be equipped to develop rich, interactive virtual reality experiences using Unity. So, let's get to it!
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Unity Virtual Reality Projects
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
11
What's Next?
Index

Chapter 1. Virtually Everything for Everyone

 

This virtual reality thing calls into question, what does it mean to "be somewhere"?

Before cell phones, you would call someone and it would make no sense to say, "Hey, where are you?" You know where they are, you called their house, that's where they are.

So then cell phones come around and you start to hear people say, "Hello. Oh, I'm at Starbucks," because the person on the other end wouldn't necessarily know where you are, because you became un-tethered from your house for voice communications.

So when I saw a VR demo, I had this vision of coming home and my wife has got the kids settled down, she has a couple minutes to herself, and she's on the couch wearing goggles on her face. I come over and tap her on the shoulder, and I'm like, "Hey, where are you?"

It's super weird. The person's sitting right in front of you, but you don't know where they are.

 
 --Jonathan Stark, mobile expert and podcaster

Welcome to virtual reality! In this book, we will explore what it takes to create virtual reality experiences on our own. We will take a walk through a series of hands-on projects, step-by-step tutorials, and in-depth discussions using the Unity 5 3D game engine and other free or open source software. Though the virtual reality technology is rapidly advancing, we'll try to capture the basic principles and techniques that you can use to make your VR games and applications feel immersive and comfortable.

In this first chapter, we will define virtual reality and illustrate how it can be applied not only to games but also many other areas of interest and productivity. This chapter discusses the following topics:

  • What is virtual reality?

  • Differences between virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)

  • How VR applications may differ from VR games

  • Types of VR experiences

  • Technical skills that are necessary for the development of VR