Book Image

Unity Virtual Reality Projects - Second Edition

By : Jonathan Linowes
Book Image

Unity Virtual Reality Projects - Second Edition

By: Jonathan Linowes

Overview of this book

Unity has become the leading platform for building virtual reality games, applications, and experiences for this new generation of consumer VR devices. Unity Virtual Reality Projects walks you through a series of hands-on tutorials and in-depth discussions on using the Unity game engine to develop VR applications. With its practical and project-based approach, this book will get you up to speed with the specifics of VR development in Unity. You will learn how to use Unity to develop VR applications that can be experienced with devices such as Oculus, Daydream, and Vive. Among the many topics and projects, you will explore gaze-based versus hand-controller input, world space UI canvases, locomotion and teleportation, software design patterns, 360-degree media, timeline animation, and multiplayer networking. You will learn about the Unity 3D game engine via the interactive Unity Editor, and you will also learn about C# programming. By the end of the book, you will be fully equipped to develop rich, interactive VR experiences using Unity.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Using Unity skyboxes

Back in the olden days, or at least before 360 photos, we simply referred to skyboxes as the way to create background imagery in computer graphics. Skyboxes depict what's far on the horizon, may contribute to the ambient lighting of the scene, be used for rendering reflections on object surfaces, and are not interactable. Unity supports skyboxes as part of the Lighting Environment for each scene. We used skyboxes already in a few of the previous chapters' projects (including Wispy Sky and Skull Platform ones).

Common sources of skyboxes are cylindrical panorama, spherical panorama (360 images), and a six-sided cube. We won't consider the cylindrical one, since it's less useful for VR.

Six-sided or cubemap skyboxes

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