Book Image

Mastering Oculus Rift Development

By : Jack Donovan
Book Image

Mastering Oculus Rift Development

By: Jack 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.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering Oculus Rift Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Installing the Oculus runtime


Now that we've covered the basics of VR in theory, it's time for some practice. The first thing you'll have to do is download the Oculus runtime, which is the background process responsible for handling all of the activity in your Rift.

Open a web browser and navigate to http://www.oculus.com/setup. This page will provide a download link to the Rift setup package, which includes the runtime you need and Oculus home, the central hub for browsing and starting all of your Oculus software.

Note

Setting up the Rift requires an Internet connection and about 30-60 minutes of setup time. The setup utility will guide you through the process step by step on screen.

After all of the software required to run the Rift is installed, you'll run through a quick hardware calibration step that will set up your constellation tracker, remote, and the headset itself. It will also help you set values such as height and interpupillary distance (IPD).

IPD is the distance between the pupils of your eyes, and even though it may seem like everyone's IPDs are similar to each other, significant inaccuracies can affect the way we perceive scale. Scale is everything in VR, especially when you're trying to use size to convey a mood or purpose, so ensuring your IPD is accurate is important in experiencing content exactly as it was meant to be experienced.