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

Understanding the Unity characters


A first-person character is such a key asset in a VR project that we really should understand its components inside out. So, before we go about building one for our project, it would be a good idea to take a close look at the built-in components and standard assets that Unity provides.

Unity components

As you probably know, each Unity game object contains a set of associated components. Unity includes many types of built-in components, which you can see by browsing the Component menu in the main menu bar. Each component adds properties and behaviors to the object that it belongs to. A component's properties are accessible via the Unity editor's Inspector panel and scripts. A script attached to a game object is also a type of component, and may have properties that you can set in the Inspector panel.

The component types used to implement first-person characters include the Camera, Character Controller, and/or Rigidbody, and various scripts. Let's review each...