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

Summary


Congratulations! You received an "A" on your Solar System science project!

In this chapter, we built a Solar System simulation that can be viewed in virtual reality using a Cardboard VR viewer and an Android phone. This project uses and expands the RenderBox library, as discussed in Chapter 5, RenderBox Engine.

To begin, we added a Sphere component to our repertoire. Initially, it was rendered using a solid color lighting material. Then, we defined a diffuse lighting material and rendered the sphere with an Earth image texture, resulting in a rendered globe. Next, we enhanced the material to accept two textures, adding an additional one to the back/"night" side of the sphere. And lastly, we created an unlit texture material, which is used for the Sun. Armed with actual sizes of the planets and distances from the Sun, we configured a Solar System scene with nine planets, the Earth's moon, and the Sun. We added a star field as a sky dome, and we animated the heavenly bodies for their...