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

Updating the RenderBox library


With the Solar System project implemented and our code stabilized, you might realize that we've built some code that is not necessarily specific to this application, which can be reused in other projects, and ought to make its way back to the RenderBox library. That's what we'll do now.

We recommend you do this directly within Android Studio, selecting and copying from this project's hierarchy view to the other's. Perform the following steps:

  1. Move all the .shader files from the Solar System's res/raw/ directory into the res/raw/ directory of the RenderBox lib's RenderBox module. If you've been following along, there will be eight files for the vertex and fragment .shader files for day_night, diffuse_lighting, solid_color_lighting, and unilt_tex.

  2. Move all the Component and Material .java files from the Solar System's RenderBoxExt module folder to the corresponding folders in RenderBox lib's RenderBox module. Remove all invalid references to MainActivity in the...