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

User calibrations


How tall are you? Are you presently sitting or standing? Am I referring to your real-life human self or your player inside the virtual world? Your first-person VR experience may not feel right if your virtual self isn't calibrated.

Mind you, I am not referring to your VR headset's physical configurations. For example, Oculus Configuration Utility lets you calibrate the settings for eye relief (how far the HMD lenses are from your eyes) and Interpupillary Distance (IPD) (distance between your eyes), which affect the low-level distortion rendering that is performed by the SDK drivers. Although those may be important to have a satisfactory experience, I'm referring to calibrating the in-game character in the scene with you—the player.

A character's height

I do not know whether you've been paying much attention to the first-person camera height, but it appears that we shrunk recently. Before this chapter, the eye-level of the camera was set to be eye-to-eye with Ethan. Now, we...