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

Globes


First, let's use a standard Unity sphere, such as the one that we used in the earlier Crystal Ball example with the Earth texture image. Import this Tissot_euirectangular.png image, which is included with this book and perform the following steps:

  1. Move Cylinder 4 out of the way and set its Position to (-3, 0, -3.5).

  2. Create a new sphere by navigating to GameObject | 3D Object | Sphere, set its Position to (0, 1.5, 0), and name it Sphere 5. Add the Rotator script if you want.

  3. Drag the texture named Tissot_equirectangular onto the sphere.

  4. Try it in VR. Take a close look at the globe, as shown in the following image:

Note that unfortunately, the Tissot circles are oval, not circular, except along the equator. It turns out that the default sphere provided in Unity does not mesh well for equirectangular texture maps. Instead, I have provided one designed specifically for this purpose, PhotoSphere.fbx (which happens to be the default sphere model in 3D Studio Max). Let's try it:

  1. Move Sphere 5...