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

Summary


In this chapter, we took a deep dive into what it means to have a first-person character in Unity and virtual reality. We started by dissecting the Characters prefabs under Unity's Standard Assets and the components that they use, including Camera, Character Controller, and/or Rigidbody.

Then, we developed our own first-person character, starting with the static positioned VR camera rig that we used for our Diorama scene. We incrementally added features to move in the direction of your gaze, gravity, solid-object collisions, and use head gestures to start and stop walking. We made adjustments for camera height and explored the relationship between a first-person head versus a body in virtual reality. Lastly, we reviewed some of the factors that VR developers should think about to provide a comfortable VR experience and avoid motion sickness.

It is not my intent to say that you should always build your own first-person controllers instead of using the prefabs provided by Unity or VR...