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

Viewing a regular photo


Now that we got that done, let's prepare our app to also be able to view regular flat photos. We'll do this by rendering them onto a plane. So first we need to define a Plane component.

Defining the Plane component and allocating buffers

The Plane component rightfully belongs to the RenderBox library, but for the time being, we'll add it directly to the app.

Create a new Java class file in the RenderBoxExt/components/ folder, and name it Plane. Define it as extends RenderObject, as follows:

public class Plane extends RenderObject {
}

As with other geometry in the RenderBox library, we'll define the plane with triangles. Simply two adjacent triangles are required, a total of six indices. The following data arrays define our default plane's 3D coordinates, UV texture coordinates, vertex colors (middle gray), normal vectors, and corresponding indices. Add the following code at the top of the class:

    public static final float[] COORDS = new float[] {
            -1.0f,...