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

The Camera component


A Camera class is another type of Component, positioned in space like other component objects. The camera is special because through the camera's eyes, we render the scene. For VR, we render it twice, once for each eye.

Let's create the Camera class, and then see how it works. Create it in the renderbox/components folder and define it as follows:

public class Camera extends Component {
    private static final String TAG = "renderbox.Camera";

    private static final float Z_NEAR = .1f;
    public static final float Z_FAR = 1000f;

    private final float[] camera = new float[16];
    private final float[] view = new float[16];
    public Transform getTransform(){return transform;}

    public Camera(){
        //The camera breaks pattern and creates its own Transform
        transform = new Transform();
    }

    public void onNewFrame(){
        // Build the camera matrix and apply it to the ModelView.
        Vector3 position = transform.getPosition();
        Matrix...