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

Photospheres


Yes sir, it's all the rage these days. It's better than panoramas. It's better than selfies. It's maybe even better than Snapchat! We're finally getting to the moment that you've been waiting for! It's 360-degree photospheres!

We have covered a lot of topics in this chapter, which will now make it fairly easy to talk about 360-degree photospheres. Now, all we need is a 360-degree photo. You can try searching on Google Images for a 360-degree photo. Alternatively, you can check out the Flickr pool (https://www.flickr.com/groups/equirectangular/pool/). You can also make your own using a Ricoh Theta camera, or Google's Photo Sphere app that is available for Android and iOS. For this example, I'll use one named FarmHouse.jpg, which is provided with this book:

Let's build it. Here are the complete steps to set up a photo sphere in Unity, starting with a new empty scene:

  1. Create a new scene by navigating to File | New Scene. Then, navigate to File | Save Scene and name it PhotoSphere...