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

Accentuating depth with particle effects


It's easy to establish a sense of scale indoors, but sometimes when you're in a large open space, it's difficult to see how far away something is, even with the depth perception that the Oculus Rift enables. To mitigate this, many VR games and experiences use a subtle global particle effect to give players a depth reference independent of the level's geometry. In this section, we'll explore Unity's Shuriken particle system to explore how a technique like this is implemented.

Open the Create menu in the Hierarchy window and select Particle System to create a new default particle system in your scene. It won't look like much to begin with, just simple white dots emitting from a point in a conical shape:

We can edit the particle properties directly in the Inspector panel, but the system is pretty complex, so we can also expand it out into its own menu to get a better view of what we're editing. Open the particle system's properties in Inspector and press...