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

Ethan, the walker


A starting point for much of VR is gaming. So, we might as well start out from there, too! We are going to give our character, Ethan, a life of his own. Well, sort of (or not), because he's going to become a zombie!

We left off at the diorama, with Ethan hanging out. You can make him run around the scene if you have a keyboard or gamepad, but in today's VR having that is not guaranteed. In fact, if you're viewing the scene with a Google Cardboard, it's pretty unlikely that you'll have a handheld controller (notwithstanding the Bluetooth game controllers). Let's be honest. Even with the Oculus Rift, requiring a keyboard or a gamepad controller is not very user-friendly, since you can't see your hands. Perhaps, there's another way to make him move around. One technique is to use the direction of your gaze while wearing your VR headset.

Before we attempt this, we'll first transform Ethan into a zombie and have him walk around aimlessly without any user control. We'll do this...