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

Fine tuning the Earth


If you're a space geek, you might be thinking that there are a few things we could do to our Earth model. For one, we should add the night view texture. (Mars and the other planets don't need one because their cities shut off all their lights at night.) Also, the Earth is slightly tilted on its axis. We can fix that.

The night texture

First, let's add the night texture. To do this, let's make an Earth Java class a subclass of a Planet. Right-click on your Java solarsystem folder, select New | Java Class, and name it Earth. Then, start defining it like this:

public class Earth extends Planet {

    public Earth(float distance, float radius, float rotation, float orbit, int texId, int nightTexId, Transform origin) {
        super(distance, radius, rotation, orbit, origin);
        transform.addComponent(new Sphere(texId, nightTexId));
    }
}

This requires that we add a new constructor to the Planet class, which omits texId, since the Earth constructor creates the new Sphere...