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


I hope you're as excited as I am with what we accomplished here! We built a truly practical Cardboard VR app to view a gallery of regular photos and 360-degree photospheres. The project uses the RenderBox library, as discussed in Chapter 5, RenderBox Engine.

To begin with, we illustrated how photospheres work and viewed one on Cardboard using the RenderBox library without any custom changes. Then, to view a regular photo, we created a Plane component to be used as a virtual projection screen. We wrote new materials and shaders to render images with a frame border.

Next, we defined a new Image class and loaded images from the phone's camera folder into a list, and wrote a method to show the image on the screen Plane, correcting its orientation and aspect ratio. Then, we built a user interface that shows a grid of thumbnail images and lets you select one by gazing at it and clicking on the Cardboard trigger to display the image. The grid is scrollable, which required us to add threading...