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

Creating the Sun


The Sun will be rendered as a textured sphere. However, it's not shaded with front and back sides like our Earth. We need to render it unlit or rather unshaded. This means we need to create the UnlitTextureMaterial.

We have a texture file for the Sun, too (and all the planets as well).We won't show all of them in the chapter although they're included with the downloadable files for the book.

Drag a copy of the sun_tex.png file onto your res/drawable/ folder.

Unlit texture shaders

As we've seen earlier in this book, unlit shaders are much simpler than ones with lighting. In your res/raw/ folder, create files for unlit_tex_vertex.shader and unlit_tex_fragment.shader, and then define them, as follows.

File: unlit_tex_vertex.shader

uniform mat4 u_MVP;

attribute vec4 a_Position;
attribute vec2 a_TexCoordinate;

varying vec3 v_Position;
varying vec2 v_TexCoordinate;

void main() {
   // pass through the texture coordinate
   v_TexCoordinate = a_TexCoordinate;

   // final point in...