Book Image

Unity 2020 Virtual Reality Projects - Third Edition

By : Jonathan Linowes
Book Image

Unity 2020 Virtual Reality Projects - Third Edition

By: Jonathan Linowes

Overview of this book

This third edition of the Unity Virtual Reality (VR) development guide is updated to cover the latest features of Unity 2019.4 or later versions - the leading platform for building VR games, applications, and immersive experiences for contemporary VR devices. Enhanced with more focus on growing components, such as Universal Render Pipeline (URP), extended reality (XR) plugins, the XR Interaction Toolkit package, and the latest VR devices, this edition will help you to get up to date with the current state of VR. With its practical and project-based approach, this book covers the specifics of virtual reality development in Unity. You'll learn how to build VR apps that can be experienced with modern devices from Oculus, VIVE, and others. This virtual reality book presents lighting and rendering strategies to help you build cutting-edge graphics, and explains URP and rendering concepts that will enable you to achieve realism for your apps. You'll build real-world VR experiences using world space user interface canvases, locomotion and teleportation, 360-degree media, and timeline animation, as well as learn about important VR development concepts, best practices, and performance optimization and user experience strategies. By the end of this Unity book, you'll be fully equipped to use Unity to develop rich, interactive virtual reality experiences.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Implementing basic glide locomotion

Locomotion refers to moving around the scene in a continuous way. In this first example, we'll implement a basic glide locomotion mechanic using the thumbstick on your hand controller to move you in a given direction. We'll start with moving forward (and backward) with a vertical push of the thumbstick. There are several ways you can decide what "forward" means, either based on the direction the player is looking (camera forward direction) or based on the direction the hand controller is pointing, or by using the horizontal press of the thumbstick to rotate. Our script will support all these options: camera forward, hand forward, and thumbstick rotate.

Caution is advised when using glide locomotion in VR as it can cause motion sickness in some players. For this reason, teleportation is often the preferred mechanism in VR. This can be mitigated, for example, if the player is driving "inside" a vehicle because...