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

Input with controllers, remotes, and more


What you choose as the primary input device for your VR experience will have a lot of bearing on how it feels. Out of the box, you have three possible solutions for controlling your game: the Xbox controller, the Oculus remote, or your keyboard and mouse. Once the Oculus Touch controllers mentioned in the last section are released at the end of 2016, you'll have a much more immersive way of interacting with VR experiences, and the implementation will be similar to the Xbox controller's implementation but with the added ability of tracking the user's hands just like the Rift headset is tracked.

The Xbox controller, included with the Oculus Rift and pictured here, is ergonomic but still has numerous unique inputs, meaning it's a decent choice for a game with complex controls:

For simpler games that emphasize observation and exploration over mechanical input, the Oculus remote is the perfect simple solution. It only has a few buttons, making it easy to use in tandem with the headset, and lending itself to head-based interfaces (which we'll cover in a later chapter).

This is an image of the Oculus remote, also included with the Oculus Rift:

If all else fails, you can use your keyboard and mouse, but because the keyboard is complicated and somewhat restrictive, you should always look to simpler input methods unless you have a strong particular reason for using the keyboard.