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

The reticle cursor


A variant of the visor HUD that is essential in first-person shooter games is a reticle or crosshair cursor. The analogy here is that you're looking through a gun-sight or an eyepiece (rather than a visor), and your head movement is moving in unison with the gun or turret itself. You can do this with a regular game object (for example, Quad + texture image), but this chapter is about UI. So, let's use our canvas, as follows:

  1. Find your Main Camera object in the Hierarchy panel.

  2. From the Project panel, drag the DefaultCanvas prefab onto the camera object so that it becomes a child of the camera. Name it ReticleCursor.

  3. Set the Rect Transform component's Pos X, Pos Y, Pos Z to (0, 0, 1).

  4. Delete its child objects—Image and Text.

  5. Add a raw image child by selecting from the main menu bar navigating through GameObject | UI | Raw Image and making sure that it's a child of ReticleCursor.

  6. In the Raw Image panel's Rect Transform, set Pos X, Pos Y, Pos Z to (0, 0, 0) and Width, Height to...