Book Image

Mastering Oculus Rift Development

By : Jack Donovan
Book Image

Mastering Oculus Rift Development

By: Jack Donovan

Overview of this book

Virtual reality (VR) is changing the world of gaming and entertainment as we know it. VR headsets such as the Oculus Rift immerse players in a virtual world by tracking their head movements and simulating depth, giving them the feeling that they are actually present in the environment. We will first use the Oculus SDK in the book and will then move on to the widely popular Unity Engine, showing you how you can add that extra edge to your VR games using the power of Unity. In this book, you’ll learn how to take advantage of this new medium by designing around each of its unique features. This book will demonstrate the Unity 5 game engine, one of most widely-used engines for VR development, and will take you through a comprehensive project that covers everything necessary to create and publish a complete VR experience for the Oculus Rift. You will also be able to identify the common perils and pitfalls of VR development to ensure that your audience has the most comfortable experience possible. By the end of the book, you will be able to create an advanced VR game for the Oculus Rift, and you’ll have everything you need to bring your ideas into a new reality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering Oculus Rift Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 3. Improving Performance and Avoiding Discomfort

Virtual reality is a powerful medium, and with great power comes great responsibility. Because virtual reality is tied directly to your senses, it's important to consider anything that might cause interruptions or appear strange to the user.

Back in Chapter 1, Exploring a New Reality with the Oculus Rift, we briefly covered the adverse effects of inconsistent or low frame rates, and the concept of Asynchronous Timewarp that the Oculus Rift uses to mitigate these effects. However, Asynchronous Timewarp does take away from the immersion of the experience and should be treated as a last resort for the best results.

In this chapter, we'll go over several techniques you can use as you develop more complex games to keep them running optimally, and ensure your users are able to experience a large amount of detail comfortably.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Using the Unity profiler

  • Using coroutines to split up complex work

  • Mesh optimization...