App Development Made Easy: Create Your First Virtual Reality-Ready Application

Virtual reality and augmented reality are currently two of the biggest technology and development trends. Being able to code and make a VR or AR-ready app is a skill that’s incredibly competitive if done right.

In this article, we break down the process behind creating your first virtual reality-ready application.

Tools needed include:

• Oculus Rift or any other VR/AR peripheral
• Unity
• A control pad (depending on the peripheral, since Rift doesn’t need one)

The impact of virtual reality on the mobile world

Virtual reality and augmented reality became mainstream material”when John Hanke and Niantic explored these avenues with their game “Ingress” and with their well renowned Pokemon GO! With a natural focus on the gaming world, both virtual and augmented reality became quite popular in a very short timeframe.

The future of VR, especially when applied to the mobile world, has a single route, much of which can be applied to social networking and various other mobile products. is related to Social Media and Social Networks in general. Even Facebook is currently trying to apply VR and AR technologies, and that, of course, states the potential of mass acceptance of these technologies in the near future.

Source: The Drum

VR integration on mobile: What, where, and when

Integrating virtual reality in a mobile app is not an easy task, and it depends heavily on your app’s duties. For example, SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) is a VR technology that translates data from the real world to the virtual one and vice-versa. This technology is currently used in TESLA’s “summon” feature for their Model X and Model S.

The app analyses the surrounding environment from the car’s sensors to automatically drive it close to you (with 1-mile limitation). TESLA is currently applying SLAM to instant Machine Learning.

Source: YouTube

There are endless use cases for VR and AR technologies. Let’s go over a quick example around how to begin adding the functionality within your own app.

The setup

In order to create a mobile-ready app, you must ensure that you are able to communicate with your device by sending adb devices from a command prompt. This must be done, of course, after you have connected your device via USB.

The Oculus Development experts say: “All Gear VR applications must be signed with an Oculus Signature File (osig) during development to access low-level VR functionality on your mobile device. This signature comes in the form of an Oculus-issued file that you include in your application.”

This is a tricky step and must be done properly, otherwise, it will block the entire process.

Source: Ideaing

To create an app in Unity, we can start with the example of the ball in the play area. This “exercise” consists in creating a play area within Unity and, by including an object (generally a ball), we will be able to control it via our peripheral.

Here’s the process:

• In the GameObject pulldown menu, select 3D Object > Plane
• Find Plane in the Hierarchy View, then rename it “floor.” This will be your floor for the playing area. Let’s add the walls now.

• 

• Select 3D Object, Cube
• Find Cube in the Hierarchy View and rename it Wall1.
• Stretch it until it covers the length of the play area
• Repeat the process until you have all your four walls

Now that we have all these together, let’s add a ball.

• Select 3D Object, Sphere
• Right-click Sphere in the Hierarchy View and rename it “player”

• 

In order to play the game, we must include a script that “player” will follow when it comes to movements. Here’s how:

• Add a RigidBody component to “player.” This is done so we can actually move it.
• Include the script that will let us control “player.” Right-click Player Controller (Script) and edit script. Here’s how it should look:

• using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;

  public class temp : MonoBehaviour {

  // Use this for initialization
void Start () {

  }

  // Update is called once per frame
void Update () {

  }
}


Wrapping it up

Yes, you’ve done it! You now know the initial steps to create created your first VR feature. Pretty simple, right?

If you have additional questions, please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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