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

Constructing a simple menu


Now that we've got an input module to process input from our HMD, we can start constructing an interactive menu as our first UI element. We'll start simple and then move onto more complex functionality before establishing in-game UI elements in the next section.

Setting up a canvas

In Unity's UGUI system, every UI element must be a child of a Canvas object. A default canvas is created any time a UI element is added to a scene, but you can also add elements directly to an existing canvas and group individual elements together under one system.

In this section, we'll create a canvas to group our main menu elements together and some buttons to start and quit the game.

Open the Create menu in your hierarchy and select Canvas in the UI list. Right-click on your new Canvas object and select Image under UI; this will create an image-based UI element and make it a child of your new canvas. Your new objects in the hierarchy should now look as follows:

If you center the new...