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)

Handy Interactables

You're in a virtual world with all this cool stuff; it is our nature to try to reach out and touch something. While gaze-based selection, as we saw in the previous chapter, is a good first step for interacting with virtual scenes, most people intuitively want to use their hands. Most VR devices provide a hand controller to select, grab, and interact with virtual objects in the scene.

In this chapter, we introduce practices for capturing user input in Unity, illustrating how to use them in a simple VR scene. Everyone loves balloons, so in this project we will make balloons. We may even pop a few. We will continue from the previous chapter, using C# programming for basic scripting, and explore several software design patterns for user input. We will discuss the following topics:

  • Polling for input device data
  • Using scriptable data objects for storing and...