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

Day and night material


Honestly though, the back of the Earth looks uncannily dark. I mean, this isn't the 18th century. So much nowadays is 24 x 7, especially our cities. Let's represent this with a separate Earth night texture that has city lights.

We have a file for you to use named earth_night_tex.jpg. Drag a copy of the file into your res/drawable/ folder.

It may be a little difficult to discern on this book's page, but this is what the texture image looks like:

Day/night shader

To support this, we will create a new DayNightMaterial class that takes both versions of the Earth texture. The material will also incorporate the corresponding fragment shader that takes into consideration the normal vector of the surface relative to the light source direction (using dot products, if you're familiar with vector math) to decide whether to render using the day or night texture image.

In your res/raw/ folder, create files for day_night_vertex.shader and day_night_fragment.shader, and then define them...