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

Capturing a 360-degree media


So far, we've been talking about monoscopic media—a 360-degree photo or video shot with a single lens point of view, albeit from all directions. When viewed in VR, yes, there are left and right eyes, but this is a stereo view of the same flat image that was projected onto a sphere. It doesn't provide any real parallax or illusion of depth through occlusion. You can rotate your head, but you should not move its position from the center of the sphere. Otherwise, the immersive illusion may be broken.

What about true 360-degree stereo? What if each eye has its own photo sphere offset from the other eye's position? Stereoscopic 360-degree recording and playback is a very difficult problem.

To capture non-stereo 360-degree media, you can use a rig such as GoPro Kolor, pictured in the following image on the left. It records all six directions at once with six separate GoPro cameras. The synchronized videos are then stitched together with special, advanced imaging software...