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)

Capturing 360-degrees in Unity

We've talked about using 360-degree media captured using 360 cameras. But what if you wanted to capture a 360 image or video from within your Unity app and share it on the internet? This could be useful for marketing and promoting your VR apps, or just simply using Unity as a content generation tool but using 360-degree video as the final distribution medium. First, I'll explain how to capture 360 images, including cubemaps and reflection probes, within Unity with a simple script. Then, I'll suggest some third-party tools you should consider that have more features.

Capturing cubemaps and reflection probes

Unity includes support for capturing scene views as part of its lighting engine. A call to camera.RenderToCubemap() will bake a static cubemap of your scene using the camera's current position and other settings.

The example script given in the Unity documentation, https://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation...