Book Image

Unity Virtual Reality Projects

By : Jonathan Linowes
Book Image

Unity Virtual Reality Projects

By: Jonathan Linowes

Overview of this book

What is consumer “virtual reality�? Wearing a head-mounted display you view stereoscopic 3D scenes. You can look around by moving your head, and walk around using hand controls or motion sensors. You are engaged in a fully immersive experience. On the other hand, Unity is a powerful game development engine that provides a rich set of features such as visual lighting, materials, physics, audio, special effects, and animation for creating 2D and 3D games. Unity 5 has become the leading platform for building virtual reality games, applications and experiences for this new generation of consumer VR devices. Using a practical and project-based approach, this book will educate you about the specifics of virtual reality development in Unity. You will learn how to use Unity to develop VR applications which can be experienced with devices such as the Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard. We will then learn how to engage with virtual worlds from a third person and first person character point of view. Furthermore, you will explore the technical considerations especially important and possibly unique to VR. The projects in the book will demonstrate how to build a variety of VR experiences. You will be diving into the Unity 3D game engine via the interactive Unity Editor as well as C-Sharp programming. By the end of the book, you will be equipped to develop rich, interactive virtual reality experiences using Unity. So, let's get to it!
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Unity Virtual Reality Projects
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
11
What's Next?
Index

Building and sharing a custom VRChat room


If your goal is simpler—to build a virtual reality world and share it with others as a shared social experience—you can use one of the number of existing social VR applications that provide the infrastructure and allow customization. At the time of writing this book, these include VRChat, JanusVR, AltSpaceVR, ConVRge, VRoom, and others.

One of my favorites is VRChat, which we will use in the next project. VRChat is built with Unity, and you can use Unity to make custom worlds and avatars. If you haven't tried it, download a copy of the client from http://www.vrchat.net/download and play around with it. (At the time of writing this book, you can enter VRChat using the Oculus Rift, but not on your mobile. However, it can also run in non-VR desktop mode.)

Choose a scene to play in VRChat. Pick any Unity scene you want. It could be the Diorama playground that we used earlier in this book, the PhotoGallery from Chapter 8, Walk-throughs and Rendering, or...