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

An animated walk-through


Next, we'll implement an automated walk-through of the scene. In conventional games, this is often used for a cut-scene, that is, a canned fly-through animation as a transition from one level to another. In VR, it's somewhat different. Walk-throughs can really be the VR experience itself. Head tracking is still active. So, it's not simply a pre-recorded video. You can look around and experience it, and it is more like an amusement park ride. This is often called an on-the-rails VR experience.

Unity's animation system

Unity's animation system is a powerful multipart system that lets you build advanced and intricate animation behaviors. The animation system has different but similar sounding parts:

  • An Animation Curve defines a spline curve for a specific property that changes its value over time.

  • An Animation Clip is a named set of curves that can be applied to an object and played (it animates the object). It can be edited in the Animation View panel.

  • An Animator Controller...