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)

Unity VR Support and Toolkits

Generally, as a developer, you spend your time working on your project scene. As we did for the diorama in the previous chapter, you'll add objects, attach materials, write scripts, and so on. When you build and run your project, the scene is rendered on a VR device and responds in real time to head and hand motions. The following diagram summarizes this Unity system VR architecture:

Within your scene, you may include a camera rig and other higher-level toolkit prefabs and components. All device manufacturers provide toolkits that are tuned to their specific devices. At a minimum, this includes the Unity Camera component for rendering the VR scene. It probably also includes a whole suite of prefabs and components, some required and some optional, which really help you create interactive, responsive, and comfortable VR experiences. We will go...