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

Formation of the Solar System


This is our chance to throw some real science into our project. The following table shows the actual distance, size, rotation, and orbit values for each of the planets. (Most of this data came from http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/planets/.)

Planet

Distance from Sun (millions km)

Radius size (km)

Day length (Earth hours)

Year length (Earth years)

Mercury

57.9

2440

1408.8

0.24

Venus

108.2

6052

5832

0.615

Earth

147.1

6371

24

1.0

Earth's Moon

0.363 (from Earth)

1737

0

 

Mars

227.9

3390

24.6

2.379

Jupiter

778.3

69911

9.84

11.862

Saturn

1427.0

58232

10.2

29.456

Uranus

2871.0

25362

17.9

84.07

Neptune

4497

24622

19.1

164.81

Pluto (still counts)

5913

1186

6.39

247.7

We also have texture images for each of the planets. These files are included with the downloads for this book. They should be added to the res/drawable folder, named mercury_tex.png, venus_tex.png, and so on. The following table identifies...