Book Image

Unity 2020 Virtual Reality Projects - Third Edition

By : Jonathan Linowes
Book Image

Unity 2020 Virtual Reality Projects - Third Edition

By: Jonathan Linowes

Overview of this book

This third edition of the Unity Virtual Reality (VR) development guide is updated to cover the latest features of Unity 2019.4 or later versions - the leading platform for building VR games, applications, and immersive experiences for contemporary VR devices. Enhanced with more focus on growing components, such as Universal Render Pipeline (URP), extended reality (XR) plugins, the XR Interaction Toolkit package, and the latest VR devices, this edition will help you to get up to date with the current state of VR. With its practical and project-based approach, this book covers the specifics of virtual reality development in Unity. You'll learn how to build VR apps that can be experienced with modern devices from Oculus, VIVE, and others. This virtual reality book presents lighting and rendering strategies to help you build cutting-edge graphics, and explains URP and rendering concepts that will enable you to achieve realism for your apps. You'll build real-world VR experiences using world space user interface canvases, locomotion and teleportation, 360-degree media, and timeline animation, as well as learn about important VR development concepts, best practices, and performance optimization and user experience strategies. By the end of this Unity book, you'll be fully equipped to use Unity to develop rich, interactive virtual reality experiences.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at virtual reality and realized that it can mean a lot of things to different people and can have different applications. There's no single definition, and it's a moving target. We are not alone, as everyone's still trying to figure it out. The fact is that VR is a new medium that will take years, if not decades, to reach its potential.

VR is not just for games; it can be a game-changer for many different applications. We identified over a dozen. There are different kinds of VR experiences, which we'll explore in the projects in this book.

VR headsets can be divided into those that require a separate processing unit (such as a desktop PC or a console) that runs with a powerful GPU and those that use mobile technologies for processing.

So, let's get to it! In the next chapter, we'll jump right into Unity and create our first 3D scene and learn about world coordinates, scaling, and importing 3D assets.