Course Content

Basic Project Structure:

• What to look for in Unity when creating an Oculus project. Which settings are supported in Virtual Reality and what effects do they have.

Unity as Virtual Reality Environment:

• To enable smooth development with short turnaround times, a comprehensive emulation mode is offered for Oculus VR glasses in Unity. Here, environments can be viewed at runtime in a polygonal manner. The actual handling of this mode is the key to rapid success in production.

Oculus Platform and Asset Store Packages:

• In order to develop for devices on the Oculus platform, the right interfaces must be integrated outside Unity and within the project to make the hardware fully accessible. We discuss the exact procedure and its pitfalls.

Deployment on Oculus glasses:

• Finished projects for desktop glasses like Rift have to be transferred to the player as EXE. For mobile glasses the same must be exported and installed as APK. Here is discussed how.

Positioning of objects in 3D space with physical interaction:

• In a given scene, not only static elements are usually present. In order to be able to make changes to the scene layout at runtime, the knowledge of the underlying transform mechanisms must be understood in detail. How are physics effects integrated, what has to be considered in the dynamic construction.

VRTK as entry aid to the environmental structure:

• To build up the scene on its own is not enough for usability. Using the VR framework "VRTK" for Unity as a tool, we learn to make objects touchable and usable. Thus a static environment becomes a dynamic scenery.

Dynamic instantiation of objects at runtime:

• The preparation of objects in order to be able to use them on Oculus glasses at runtime requires certain precautions and Unity know-how in order to set up so-called prefabs. This will be discussed in detail.

Scene dynamics and animations:

• How can you make things interactively "usable" in a complex way beyond mere placement in space? The corresponding prefab strategies and script interactions are taught. This way even complicated object representations can be realized together with included functions.

Framerate Problems and Troubleshooting:

• It is often trivial, but not infrequently difficult to recognize details that cause a production to stall. We will briefly describe the most popular problems here and learn methods for eliminating such stumbling blocks from the very beginning.

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Target group

3D developers from all areas (game development, visualization, architecture etc.)

Prerequisites

• Participants should be able to create and understand scripts in C#. Practical experience in building scenes and functionalities in Unity is essential.
• Existing software design and mathematical knowledge (especially vectors in 3D space) are advantageous, but not absolutely necessary.
• Practical knowledge of the basic structure of 3D graphics based on polygons is rudimentarily necessary. Details regarding this platform will be covered in the course.

Organizational matters