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 started simply by mapping a regular image on to the outside of a sphere. Then, we inverted it with a custom shader, mapping the image inside the sphere. We explored cylindrical projections of panoramas and large infographics. Then, we took several sections to understand equirectangular spherical projections and photospheres and how they're used for 360-degree immersive media in virtual reality. Lastly, we explored some of the technology behind viewing and capturing 360-degree media.

In the next chapter, we go social as we look at ways to add multi-user networking to Unity VR projects and how to add scenes to the emerging metaverse. Multiplayer games are familiar to most of us, but when combined with virtual reality, this provides a social experience that is unparalleled by any other technology. We will learn about networking technology and the new Unity Networking features that were introduced in Unity 5.1.