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)

Pointing and clicking with VR components

As we have seen, while Unity provides UI elements such as canvas text, buttons, and other controls that are specially tuned for conventional screen space UI and mobile app, using them in World Space and tying them together with VR user input can get pretty involved. World space interactions assume some physics, colliders, and ray casts to detect interaction events.

Fortunately, VR device-specific toolkits may provide components that take care of some of this work already. As we saw in previous chapters, device manufacturers provide toolkits built atop their Unity SDK with convenient scripts, prefabs, and demo scenes that illustrate how to use them.

In this case, we're looking for components that let you design scenes using Unity UI elements on a canvas, take advantage of all their EventSystem interactivity goodness, use world space...