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

Magic orbs


For the next example, we'll look at the sphere from the inside, mapping an ordinary image onto its inside surface. Then, we'll put a solid colored shell around the outside. So, you have to actually walk up to the sphere and stick your head into it to see what's there!

Follow these steps to build it (I'm using the GrandCanyon.png image that we introduced back in Chapter 2, Objects and Scale, but you can use any image—preferably a landscape with big sky):

  1. Move Sphere 1 out of the way and set its Position to (-3, 1.5, -1.5).

  2. Create a new sphere by navigating to GameObject | 3D Object | Sphere, set its Position to (0, 1.5, 0), and name it Sphere 2.

  3. Disable its Sphere Collider component by unchecking the checkbox.

  4. Create a new material by navigating to Assets | Create | Material and name it GrandCanyonInward.

  5. Drag the GrandCanyonInward material onto Sphere 2.

  6. Locate the GrandCanyon texture image and drag it onto the GrandCanyonInward component's Albedo texture (onto the square towards the...