Book Image

Cardboard VR Projects for Android

By : Jonathan Linowes, Matt Schoen
Book Image

Cardboard VR Projects for Android

By: Jonathan Linowes, Matt Schoen

Overview of this book

Google Cardboard is a low-cost, entry-level media platform through which you can experience virtual reality and virtual 3D environments. Its applications are as broad and varied as mobile smartphone applications themselves. This book will educate you on the best practices and methodology needed to build effective, stable, and performant mobile VR applications. In this book, we begin by defining virtual reality (VR) and how Google Cardboard fits into the larger VR and Android ecosystem. We introduce the underlying scientific and technical principles behind VR, including geometry, optics, rendering, and mobile software architecture. We start with a simple example app that ensures your environment is properly set up to write, build, and run the app. Then we develop a reusable VR graphics engine that you can build upon. And from then on, each chapter is a self-contained project where you will build an example from a different genre of application, including a 360 degree photo viewer, an educational simulation of our solar system, a 3D model viewer, and a music visualizer. Given the recent updates that were rolled out at Google I/O 2016, the authors of Cardboard VR Projects for Android have collated some technical notes to help you execute the projects in this book with Google VR Cardboard Java SDK 0.8, released in May 2016. Refer to the article at https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/GoogleVRUpdateGuideforCardbook.pdf which explains the updates to the source code of the projects.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Cardboard VR Projects for Android
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Vertex color material and shaders


The Cube component needs a Material to render it on the display. Our Cube has separate colors for each face, defined as separate vertex colors. We'll define a VertexColorMaterial instance and the corresponding shaders.

Vertex color shaders

At a minimum, the OpenGL pipeline requires that we define a vertex shader, which transforms vertices from 3D space to 2D, and a fragment shader, which calculates the pixel color values for a raster segment. Similar to the simple shaders that we created in Chapter 3, Cardboard Box, we'll create two files, vertex_color_vertex.shader and vertex_color_fragment.shader. Unless you have done so already, create a new Android resource directory with the raw type and name it raw. Then, for each file, right-click on the directory, and go to New | File. Use the following code for each of the two files. The code for the vertex shader is as follows:

// File:res/raw/vertex_color_vertex.shader
uniform mat4 u_Model;
uniform mat4 u_MVP;

attribute...