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 10. Social VR Metaverse

That's me, Linojon, the guy with a baseball cap in front, to the left! Momentously, the preceding photo was captured during the eve of the metaverse on December 21, 2014 in a live VRChat session. I had built a seasonally-themed world named GingerLand and invited my chat room friends to visit during one of the weekly meetups. Then, someone suggested, "Hey, let's take a group picture!" So, we all assembled on the front porch of my wintery cabin and said, "Cheese!" The rest is history.

For many people, the visceral experience of socially interacting live with other people in VR is at least as dramatic as the difference between using Facebook versus browsing a static website, or sharing Snapchats versus viewing an online photo album. It's very personal and alive. If you've tried it out yourself, you know exactly what I mean. We're now going to look at how social VR experiences can be implemented using Unity. There are many approaches, from building it from scratch...