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 7. Hearing and Believing with 3D Audio

Experiencing something is so much more than seeing it. We've been focusing on visual elements of VR, but for a truly immersive experience, we need to engage as many of the player's senses as we can, and this applies particularly to hearing.

A lot of the information we process based on our hearing is subconscious; for instance, if sound waves hit the back of our ears, what we hear is muffled by their conical shape. This muffling tells our brain that the sound is originating from behind us. If the sound waves bounce off our shoulders before entering our ears, that tells our brain that the sound is above us.

In typical screen-based games, this level of audio realism isn't possible, because the lack of head tracking makes our ears stay in the same static spot. However, with HMDs like the Oculus Rift, we can calculate the relative position and rotation of each ear, meaning the potential granularity of a realistic audio system is much greater. In this...