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)

Studying VR design principles

Before we get into the implementation details, I want to introduce the topic of designing three-dimensional UIs and VR experiences. A lot of work has been carried out in these areas over the past few decades, even more so in the past few years.

With consumer VR devices being so readily available and the existence of powerful development tools, such as Unity, it's not surprising that a lot of people are inventing and trying new things, continuously innovating and producing really excellent VR experiences. You are probably one of them. However, the context of today's VR progress cannot be viewed in a vacuum. There is a long history of research and development that feeds into present-day work. The following are some examples:

  • The 3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice (Bowman et al) book, for example, is a classic academic survey of three-dimensional user interaction for consumer, industrial, and scientific applications...