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)

Setting up our demo scene

To demonstrate lighting and rendering in Unity, we'll start the project for this chapter with an existing scene and observe the effect of removing or modifying certain lighting settings and GameObjects. When you start a new project from the Unity Hub using the Universal Render Pipeline template, it contains a default sample scene named SampleScene. For this chapter, we'll decompose the SampleScene rather than build up a new scene. (There is a risk that the SampleScene is subject to change in the future, so please adapt the instructions herein as needed.)

In the Scene, we'll create a tabbed menu panel with which you can interact within VR. I'm going to attach it to the LeftHand Controller, but if you prefer to place it as a dashboard panel in world space, feel free to do that. First, we'll adopt this SampleScene and add a VR Rig, then we'll disable lightmap baking so we can change lighting settings at runtime, and...