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)

Juicing the scene

Having the basic mechanics implemented, we can now juice it! First, we'll replace our red bouncy balls with hot fireballs. Then, we'll replace our ground plane and wall with a more graphic 3D artwork skull platform, and we can turn this into a rhythm beat game by synchronizing the balls to music!

The term juice it for game design was popularized by Jonasson and Purho in their presentation talk from 2012, Juice it or lose it—a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg). A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do, with tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input.

Great balls of fire

Let's change the balls from being red bouncy balls to balls of fire! Instead of mesh geometry, we will use a Particle Systemto render it. There are a lot of ways to get particle effects into your Unity project. If you recall, inChapter 4,UsingGaze-Based Control...