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

Summary


In this chapter, we took a grand tour of Unity's physics engine. First, I explained in layman's terms the relationship between Rigidbody, Colliders, and Physic Materials, and how the physics engine uses these to determine the velocity and collision of objects in the scene.

Then, we went through a variety of examples that showed how one can use the physics engine directly, indirectly, and not at all. The bouncy balls used the engine without scripting, but then we wrote scripts on top of it to implement a headshot game and a shower of balls. The trampoline examples use the physics engine to detect collisions, and we scripted the transfer force to another object. Lastly, we implemented our own gravity and bounce forces on a first-person character, including a jump gesture. We did all of this while orbiting the Earth! Wonders never cease!

Physics mechanics are very important in game design as well as virtual reality. Unity's robust physics API gives developers the tools that are required...