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

A simple breakdown of the rendering pipeline


Unsurprisingly, a lot goes into creating a virtual 3D world and then displaying it on a 2D screen. Unity obfuscates a lot of the low-level rendering process so we don't have to deal with it, but to master anything related to graphics it's important to have a fundamental understanding of what's happening behind the scenes.

Every step of the rendering process is handled within something called the rendering pipeline. In this section, we'll go over each step in detail so you can gain a full understanding of what graphics are.

Defining the geometry

The first part of rendering is collecting the objects to be rendered. Every object in a scene is a collection of vertices, or the points of the object's geometry, and indices, which define the faces between the points.

Every set of three indices defines a triangular face of the object. Triangles are handy for defining complex surfaces because each individual triangle can only exist on one plane, so several...