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

Equirectangular projections


Ever since it was discovered that the Earth is round, cartographers and mariners have struggled with how to project the spherical globe onto a two-dimensional chart. The variations are plentiful and the history is fascinating (if you're fascinated by that sort of thing!) The result is an inevitable distortion of some areas of the globe.

Note

To learn more about map projections and spherical distortions, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection.

As a computer graphics designer, it's perhaps a little less mysterious than it was to ancient mariners because we know about UV Texture mapping.

3D computer models in Unity are defined by meshes—a set of Vector3 points connected with edges, forming triangular shaped facets. You can unwrap a mesh (in Blender, for instance) into a flattened 2D configuration to define the mapping of texture pixels to the corresponding areas on the mesh surface (the UV coordinates). A globe of the Earth, when unwrapped, will be distorted...