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

A responsive object UI with head gestures


The last UI technique that I'll discuss is where the UI elements are not necessarily visible at all times. Rather, they may be invoked in context as a part of the gameplay. I call this a responsive object UI.

For example, in conventional video games, you might have an ammunition gauge that's always visible. In VR, you can wait for the user to look down at the weapon in his hands, and then an ammo meter on the weapon lights up, showing its status.

In this example, we are going to make the dashboard that we just built appear only when we can infer that it is the user's intent to access it. The mechanism should feel quite natural—you look down towards you feet quickly and the dashboard slides out, and when you look away after a few seconds it tucks itself in again.

Using the head position

Let's try just using the camera angle to tell if you're looking down, say within 60 degrees of looking straight down. Create a new script on the GameController named HeadGesture...