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)

To get the most out of this book

Before we get started, there are a few things that you'll need. Grab a snack, a bottle of water, or a cup of coffee. Besides that, you'll need a PC (Windows or Mac) with the current version of Unity installed (Unity 2019.4 LTS or later). Access to a VR HMD is strongly recommended in order to try out your builds and get first-hand experience of the projects developed in this book.

You don't need a super-powerful computer rig. While Unity can be a beast that can render complex scenes, the requirements for the projects in this book are not that demanding. If you are targeting an Android-based VR device (such as Oculus Go or Quest), you need just enough power to run Unity and build your project as if for any Android mobile device. If you are targeting desktop VR (such as HTC Vive, Valve Index, Oculus Rift, or Oculus Quest with a Quest Link cable), you simply need to meet the VR-ready requirements of the target device.

Chapter 3, Setting Up Your Project for VR, goes into detail of what you need for each device and platform, including SteamVR, Oculus Rift, Windows MR, Oculus Go and Quest, and Google Cardboard.

That should just about do it—a PC, the Unity software, a VR device, and the other tools described in Chapter 3, Setting Up Your Project for VR, and we're good to go! Oh, some projects will also be more complete if you download the associated assets from the Packt website, as follows.