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

Immersing your player with HRTFs


Stereophonic 3D is typically the most complex classic video game yet, but with VR, even more realistic audio is possible. Because of the data exposed through the constant tracking of the player's head, we can modify audio based on the exact position of both ears, instead of just the static head position. This modification is called a head-related transfer function (HRTF).

In this section, we'll modify our wall's audio source to be our first HRTF so we can demonstrate the capabilities and differences from 3D audio. We'll begin with Unity's simple first-party Oculus audio spatializer and then move onto Oculus's native spatializer plugin. Later, we'll create a soundscape for our level using HRTFs.

Sampling Unity's first-party HRTF

Unity features an extremely limited implementation of Oculus's HRTF spatializer that serves as a good place for getting started and hearing the subtle differences with HRTF audio.

To activate it, open the Edit menu, mouse over Project...