7. Hearing and Believing with 3D Audio | Mastering Oculus Rift Development

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Mastering Oculus Rift Development

By : Donovan

5 (3)

Mastering Oculus Rift Development

5 (3)

By: 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.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Exploring a New Reality with the Oculus Rift

1. Exploring a New Reality with the Oculus Rift

The concept of VR

Common limitations of VR games

Constellation tracking

Input with controllers, remotes, and more

The importance of frame rate

Asynchronous Timewarp

Installing the Oculus runtime

Summary

2. Stepping into Virtual Reality

2. Stepping into Virtual Reality

Getting started with Unity

Incorporating the Oculus Utilities package

Taking your first steps in VR

Enabling interaction with gaze-based mechanics

Building and running your first VR app

Summary

3. Improving Performance and Avoiding Discomfort

3. Improving Performance and Avoiding Discomfort

Using the Unity profiler

Using coroutines to split up complex work

Mesh optimization

Displaying dynamic detail with LODs

Keeping a handle on memory allocation

Object pooling

Summary

4. Interacting with Virtual Worlds

4. Interacting with Virtual Worlds

Designing basic player input

Implementing gameplay around input

Creating custom Unity input axes

Summary

5. Establishing Presence

5. Establishing Presence

Setting up the game environment

Accentuating depth with particle effects

Customizing the skybox

Enabling player interaction with the world

Populating the game world with resources

Using resources to interact with the environment

Summary

6. Adding Depth and Intuition to a User Interface

6. Adding Depth and Intuition to a User Interface

Adding a VR input module

Constructing a simple menu

Adding UI elements to the game world

Summary

7. Hearing and Believing with 3D Audio

7. Hearing and Believing with 3D Audio

The science of how we hear

Learning the basics of Unity audio

Implementing 2D stereo audio

Adding basic 3D spatialization

Immersing your player with HRTFs

Filling the game world with sound

Summary

8. Adding Tone and Realism with Graphics

8. Adding Tone and Realism with Graphics

A simple breakdown of the rendering pipeline

Forward and deferred rendering

Adding tone with color grading

Changing the appearance of objects with shaders

Summary

9. Bringing Players Together in VR

9. Bringing Players Together in VR

Creating a lobby space for joining matches

Creating a networked game

Defining player spawn points

Using Unity's matchmaker system

Tying together the multiplayer lobby

Synchronizing data in multiplayer matches

Summary

10. Publishing on the Oculus Store

10. Publishing on the Oculus Store

Packaging a final Unity build

Meeting the Oculus submission guidelines

Uploading your first build to Oculus

Summary

Adding basic 3D spatialization

In this section, we'll dive deeper into that Spatial Blend property we looked at earlier and create sound that has a discrete location in the level. We'll start by adding a few 3D sounds to our interactive walls: one to play when it's activated, and another to play when it's destroyed.

Find the audio files included with this chapter called WallActivated.wav and WallDestroyed.wav and drag them into your Audio folder:

Open your DynamicWall script and add two variables to store references to these sounds, as well as one for the Audio Source component:

public class DynamicWall : MonoBehaviour 
{ 
   ... 
   [SerializeField] private AudioClip wallActivatedClip; 
   [SerializeField] private AudioClip wallDestroyedClip; 
   private AudioSource audioSource; 
   ... 
}

We'll have to add an Audio Source component to the wall prefab before we can get a reference to it, so find an instance of DynamicWallBase to the scene and click...

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