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)

Getting started with Unity

For you beginners out there, we're going to take this chapter nice and slow, with more hand-holding than you'll get later in this book. Even if you already know Unity and have developed your own games, it may be worthwhile to revisit the fundamental concepts, since the rules are sometimes different when designing for virtual reality.

Exploring the Unity Editor

The Unity Editor consists of multiple nonoverlapping windows, or panels, that may be subdivided into panes. The following is a screenshot of a project with the default window layout, annotated to identify some of the panels: (1) Hierarchy, (2) Scene, (3) Inspector, and (4) Project:

A Unity project consists of one or more scenes, containing a hierarchy of game objects. In the preceding screenshot, I have just created a new default empty scene (File | New Scene) and added a 3D cube (GameObject | 3D Object | Cube). The Hierarchywindow...