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

Summary


In this chapter, we started off by diving into how a renderer works at a low level in order to glean a deep understanding of what's possible with graphics programming. After looking at the details, pros and cons of the forward and deferred rendering method, we created a scene that took advantage of the deferred rendering method by rendering several real-time lights without an additional rendering pass per light.

After covering the technical breakdowns, we took a brief look at several techniques you can use to give the graphics in your game a more unique, polished appearance. We started with color grading, an image effect that colors all rendered pixels uniformly based on a modified color matrix.

Finally, we looked at the broadest area of graphics programming: shaders. Unlike screen-space effects, shaders are assigned to specific meshes in a scene and can render them based on a combination of internal geometric data and parameters like textures. We created a basic shader that handles...