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 built an art gallery scene from scratch, starting with a plan drawing and going into Blender to construct an architectural structure. We imported the model into Unity and added some environmental lighting. Then, we built an artwork rig consisting of an image quad, a picture frame, and a spotlight, and placed instances of the rig on various walls throughout the gallery. Next, we imported a bunch of personal photos and wrote a script that populates the art frames at runtime. Finally, we wrote a script that takes the first-person camera on a walk-through of the scene, pausing to look at each picture one at a time for a nice, simple VR-on-rails experience.

Then, we had a detailed discussion about optimizing projects for performance and VR comfort, which means that you have to be mindful of your content and model complexity, the rendering pipeline, and the capabilities of your target platform.

In the next chapter, we will take a look at a different kind of VR experience...