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)

Making the story interactive

So far, we've used Timeline to drive our entire VR story experience from start to finish. But in fact, Timelines are a playable asset like others in Unity. For example, if you select the Blackbird Director object and look in Inspector at its Playable Director component, you'll see it has a Play On Awake checkbox and that it's currently checked. What we're going to do now is not play on awake, but rather start playing on a user event, namely looking directly at the small tree for a few seconds. When the story ends, we'll make it reset itself.

Look to play

An interesting design pattern for VR application is to wait for the player to look at something before it starts animating or otherwise becomes active in the scene. After all, it'd be a shame for the user to not notice things and miss all the action! We'll demonstrate this idea in our project by waiting for the user to look at the small tree before...