Book Image

Unity Virtual Reality Projects - Second Edition

By : Jonathan Linowes
Book Image

Unity Virtual Reality Projects - Second Edition

By: Jonathan Linowes

Overview of this book

Unity has become the leading platform for building virtual reality games, applications, and experiences for this new generation of consumer VR devices. Unity Virtual Reality Projects walks you through a series of hands-on tutorials and in-depth discussions on using the Unity game engine to develop VR applications. With its practical and project-based approach, this book will get you up to speed with the specifics of VR development in Unity. You will learn how to use Unity to develop VR applications that can be experienced with devices such as Oculus, Daydream, and Vive. Among the many topics and projects, you will explore gaze-based versus hand-controller input, world space UI canvases, locomotion and teleportation, software design patterns, 360-degree media, timeline animation, and multiplayer networking. You will learn about the Unity 3D game engine via the interactive Unity Editor, and you will also learn about C# programming. By the end of the book, you will be fully equipped to develop rich, interactive VR experiences using Unity.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Rendering photospheres

The inverse of a globe is a photosphere. Where a globe maps an equirectangular texture onto the outside surface of a sphere, a photosphere would map the texture onto the inside surface, and you view it from the inside so it surrounds you.

For our examples, I'm using the Farmhouse.png image which is provided with this book, as shown below. Feel free to use your own 360-degree photo, whether you have a 360-degree camera such as the Ricoh Theta or other brand, use a photo stitching app for Android or iOS, or download one from any number of photo sources on the web.

As we've seen, Unity ordinarily renders only the outward-facing surfaces of objects. This is determined, mathematically, as the normal direction vector of each facet of its surface mesh. A Plane is the simplest example. Back in Chapter 2, Content, Objects, and Scale, we created a big screen...