Preface

Hi there, and welcome to the exciting and ever-evolving world of Extended Reality (XR) development! If you’re feeling a mix of excitement and nervousness about diving into XR development in Unity for the first time, you’re not alone.

But don’t worry – the primary goal of this book is to make XR development accessible to everyone, regardless of prior experience. We’ll use simple language, provide vivid examples, and guide you through every step, from making objects grabbable to writing scripts in C# and incorporating hand-tracking into your scenes. You won’t even need access to a VR headset or AR-compatible smartphone to follow along; you can test most of the projects using simulators on your laptop or PC, ensuring accessibility for all.

In our own XR development journey, we’ve faced the frustration of spending endless hours trying to make a basic XR experience work. Now that we’ve gained extensive experience at notable companies such as Deutsche Telekom and academic institutions such as Fraunhofer IGD, we want to share our knowledge with you.

This book is not only a complete guide that will take you from being a novice in XR development or Unity to reaching an intermediate level in creating interactive XR applications for any domain. Its structure is also designed to help you easily access XR-related techniques to build outstanding XR applications, so you won’t need to constantly search online for answers, as we once did. Our goal is not to narrow your XR development expertise to specific use cases but to equip you with a wide array of tools so that you can bring any XR project to life, without limitations.

We’re thrilled to start on this journey with you!