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

Summary


We've been through a lot of different optimizations in this chapter, and while they may not be as exciting as dazzling effects or complex mechanics to some, they pave the road for as many massive systems as the hardware can handle at its very best.

At the beginning of this chapter, we explored the Unity profiler and used it to practice debugging CPU-intensive script functions. We implemented a solution to an expensive function by implementing it as a coroutine.

In the second section, we looked at 3D geometry and the costs of rendering it. Objects with several faces in a scene can quickly add up and tax your GPU, but by sacrificing detail strategically using mesh optimization and LODs, we can avoid overloading the renderer.

Finally, we briefly covered several different techniques for memory optimizations, all leading up to a very basic object pool system that can help any game perform more efficiently by minimizing and optimizing allocations and deallocations.

Everything covered in this...