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

Maintaining a sense of self


In VR, you could just be a floating one-dimensional eyeball in virtual space (like our initial Diorama camera), a normal human being, or maybe some full-bodied space creature. We have focused on walking around the scene and discussed how to set the camera height to the eye level. The implication was that someone experiencing VR has a sense of their own body. However, the camera height actually only makes sense when there's also a ground plane or some other stable reference point in your vicinity. When you're flying around like a bird, plane, or Superman, then the body height may not matter much.

Yet in the physical world, we all really do have bodies, and our brains kind of expect that. Issues surrounding the sense of self can get very psychological, philosophical, and even religious. Also, it's mind-bending what VR might eventually be able to do in this regard. For now, we should focus on what we need in order to help make our VR experiences comfortable for our...