Book Image

Cardboard VR Projects for Android

By : Jonathan Linowes, Matt Schoen
Book Image

Cardboard VR Projects for Android

By: Jonathan Linowes, Matt Schoen

Overview of this book

Google Cardboard is a low-cost, entry-level media platform through which you can experience virtual reality and virtual 3D environments. Its applications are as broad and varied as mobile smartphone applications themselves. This book will educate you on the best practices and methodology needed to build effective, stable, and performant mobile VR applications. In this book, we begin by defining virtual reality (VR) and how Google Cardboard fits into the larger VR and Android ecosystem. We introduce the underlying scientific and technical principles behind VR, including geometry, optics, rendering, and mobile software architecture. We start with a simple example app that ensures your environment is properly set up to write, build, and run the app. Then we develop a reusable VR graphics engine that you can build upon. And from then on, each chapter is a self-contained project where you will build an example from a different genre of application, including a 360 degree photo viewer, an educational simulation of our solar system, a 3D model viewer, and a music visualizer. Given the recent updates that were rolled out at Google I/O 2016, the authors of Cardboard VR Projects for Android have collated some technical notes to help you execute the projects in this book with Google VR Cardboard Java SDK 0.8, released in May 2016. Refer to the article at https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/GoogleVRUpdateGuideforCardbook.pdf which explains the updates to the source code of the projects.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Cardboard VR Projects for Android
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

What's in an Android app?


For our projects, we're going to use the powerful Android Studio IDE (an integrated development environment) to build Google Cardboard virtual reality applications that run on Android devices. Woot! Android Studio integrates a number of different tools and processes under one roof.

The result of all your hard work to develop an Android app is an Android application package or an .apk file, which is distributed to users via the Google Play Store or however you choose to distribute your app. This file gets installed on their Android device.

We'll jump to Android Studio itself in a moment. However, in order to shed some light on what's going on here, let's consider this end result .apk file first. What is it really? How'd we get it? Understanding the build process will help.

Keeping this in mind, for fun and to gain perspective, let's start from the end and work our way backward from the APK through the build pipeline to our app source code.

APK files

The APK file is actually...