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)

Choosing your target VR platforms and toolkits

While much of your development will focus on the artwork, behaviors of game objects, and interactive game mechanics of your application, from the very beginning of your project, you should also identifywhich platforms and devices you are targeting. In ordinary Unity projects, it's often sufficient to simply choose the Build Settings target platform (for example, Android or Windows) and then configure Player Settings for build runtime options. But for VR, there's more. You need to manage the VR plugins you will need and use additional toolkit(s) for developing the project. Generally, your Unity VR project will need to include the following:

  • Select a Target Platform for your builds (for example, Android versus Standalone/Windows).
  • Install an XR Plugin that drives the VR devices.
  • Within your scene, you will include a VR-enabled camera rig for tracking head and hand locations in 3D space...