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)

Composing our story

OUR STORY: Music begins. You start in a dark scene and notice a small tree sapling in the ground in front of you. It starts to grow into a full-sized tree. As dawn breaks, a bird's nest appears, and we notice it has an egg in it. The egg begins to shake and then hatches. A baby bird emerges, hops around, grows, and tests its wings. Finally, in daylight, it flies away to freedom.

Our story is about birth, growth, spreading your wings (literally and figuratively), and moving on. We will start with a music soundtrack and animate our graphics based on its parts.

We will be using free, off-the-shelf assets. Of course, you can use your own music and graphics, but we'll assume you're following along using the ones we have selected, which are all available online for free (links will be provided where necessary). As an instructive project, it's minimalist and not embellished with effects that you might expect...