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

Locomotion, teleportation, and sensors


We just implemented a simple look-based mechanism to move through a virtual reality scene. You could of course decide to stick with a keyboard, joystick, or a gamepad to control your character like a conventional video game. New techniques for locomotion and teleportation control are continuously being tried. Here are some ideas:

  • Look to walk: Walk in the direction of your gaze. Your feet stay on the ground, animated. This is the mechanism that we previously implemented.

  • The hover disc: Step onto a hover disc to begin moving. Step off it when you're done. This requires a way to indicate the action of stepping on and stepping off.

  • Segway: Like the hover disc but you move forward and turn by leaning into it, and slow down or stop by leaning back.

  • The Superman fly: Jump to take off, fly by looking, and crouch to land. With positional hand controllers, you can stretch your hands out to your sides to glide and in front to go up or down. Also, take off by...