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)

Summary

In this chapter, we explored many different ways of moving around within your virtual environments. We started by examining Unity's components that support conventional third-person and first-person characters and quickly realized most of those capabilities are not too useful in VR. For instance, we don't want the app to bob our head up and down as we walk, and we don't necessarily want to go jumping off buildings either. Moving around is important, but player comfort is more so. You don't want to induce motion sickness.

Locomotion is moving smoothly and linearly across the scene, akin to walking. Using gaze-based mechanics, we implemented moving in the direction you're looking and used input buttons to start and stop. Then, we separated the locomotion from head direction, always moving "forward" and using a separate input (thumbpad)...