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Mastering Oculus Rift Development

By : Donovan

5 (3)

Mastering Oculus Rift Development

5 (3)

By: Donovan

Overview of this book

Virtual reality (VR) is changing the world of gaming and entertainment as we know it. VR headsets such as the Oculus Rift immerse players in a virtual world by tracking their head movements and simulating depth, giving them the feeling that they are actually present in the environment. We will first use the Oculus SDK in the book and will then move on to the widely popular Unity Engine, showing you how you can add that extra edge to your VR games using the power of Unity. In this book, you’ll learn how to take advantage of this new medium by designing around each of its unique features. This book will demonstrate the Unity 5 game engine, one of most widely-used engines for VR development, and will take you through a comprehensive project that covers everything necessary to create and publish a complete VR experience for the Oculus Rift. You will also be able to identify the common perils and pitfalls of VR development to ensure that your audience has the most comfortable experience possible. By the end of the book, you will be able to create an advanced VR game for the Oculus Rift, and you’ll have everything you need to bring your ideas into a new reality.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Exploring a New Reality with the Oculus Rift

1. Exploring a New Reality with the Oculus Rift

The concept of VR

Common limitations of VR games

Constellation tracking

Input with controllers, remotes, and more

The importance of frame rate

Asynchronous Timewarp

Installing the Oculus runtime

Summary

2. Stepping into Virtual Reality

2. Stepping into Virtual Reality

Getting started with Unity

Incorporating the Oculus Utilities package

Taking your first steps in VR

Enabling interaction with gaze-based mechanics

Building and running your first VR app

Summary

3. Improving Performance and Avoiding Discomfort

3. Improving Performance and Avoiding Discomfort

Using the Unity profiler

Using coroutines to split up complex work

Mesh optimization

Displaying dynamic detail with LODs

Keeping a handle on memory allocation

Object pooling

Summary

4. Interacting with Virtual Worlds

4. Interacting with Virtual Worlds

Designing basic player input

Implementing gameplay around input

Creating custom Unity input axes

Summary

5. Establishing Presence

5. Establishing Presence

Setting up the game environment

Accentuating depth with particle effects

Customizing the skybox

Enabling player interaction with the world

Populating the game world with resources

Using resources to interact with the environment

Summary

6. Adding Depth and Intuition to a User Interface

6. Adding Depth and Intuition to a User Interface

Adding a VR input module

Constructing a simple menu

Adding UI elements to the game world

Summary

7. Hearing and Believing with 3D Audio

7. Hearing and Believing with 3D Audio

The science of how we hear

Learning the basics of Unity audio

Implementing 2D stereo audio

Adding basic 3D spatialization

Immersing your player with HRTFs

Filling the game world with sound

Summary

8. Adding Tone and Realism with Graphics

8. Adding Tone and Realism with Graphics

A simple breakdown of the rendering pipeline

Forward and deferred rendering

Adding tone with color grading

Changing the appearance of objects with shaders

Summary

9. Bringing Players Together in VR

9. Bringing Players Together in VR

Creating a lobby space for joining matches

Creating a networked game

Defining player spawn points

Using Unity's matchmaker system

Tying together the multiplayer lobby

Synchronizing data in multiplayer matches

Summary

10. Publishing on the Oculus Store

10. Publishing on the Oculus Store

Packaging a final Unity build

Meeting the Oculus submission guidelines

Uploading your first build to Oculus

Summary

Chapter 1. Exploring a New Reality with the Oculus Rift

What made you feel like you were truly immersed in a game world for the first time? Was it graphics that looked impressively realistic, ambient noise that perfectly captured the environment and mood, or the way the game's mechanics just started to feel like a natural reflex? Game developers constantly strive to replicate scenarios that are as real and as emotionally impactful as possible, and they've never been as close as they are now with the advent of virtual reality (VR).

VR has been a niche market since the early 1950s, often failing to evoke a meaningful sense of presence that the concept hinges on---that is, until the first Oculus Rift prototype was designed in 2010 by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. The Oculus Rift proved that modern rendering and display technology was reaching a point that immersive VR could be achieved, and that's when the new era of VR development began.

Today, VR development is as accessible as ever, comprehensively supported in the most popular off-the-shelf game development engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity3D. In this book, you'll learn all of the essentials that go into a complete VR experience, and master the techniques that will enable you to bring any idea you have into VR.

This chapter will cover everything you need to know to get started with VR, including the following points:

The concept of VR
The importance of intent in VR design
Common limitations of VR games
Vergence-accommodation conflict
The anatomy of a VR headset
Constellation tracking
The importance of input
Meeting required frame rates
Asynchronous Timewarp
Installing the Oculus runtime
Configuring your Oculus Rift
Stepping into Oculus home

CONTINUE READING

83

Tech Concepts

36

Programming languages

73

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