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)

Building an interactive dashboard

Up to now, we have been using the canvas primarily as a container of display-only information. However, the canvas can also contain interactive UI elements, including Button, Toggle, Slider, and the Dropdown lists option. In this section, we will be building an in-game interactive dashboard or control panel that is integrated into the game environment itself.

Earlier in this chapter, we discussed windshield HUDs. Dashboards are pretty much the same thing. One difference is that the dashboard may be more obviously part of the level environment and not simply an auxiliary information display or a menu. A typical in-game scenario is an automobile or a spaceship, where you are seated in a cockpit. In VR, dashboards are familiar in the home environments—for example, the Oculus Home menu is depicted in the following screenshot:

In this part of our project, we'll operate a water hose in the scene...