Mobile VR

Mobile VR originated with Google Cardboard (https://vr.google.com/cardboard/), a simple housing device for two lenses and a slot for your mobile phone. The phone's display is used to show the twin stereoscopic views. It has rotational head tracking, but it has no positional tracking. The Cardboard also provides the user with the ability to click or tap its side to make selections in a game. The complexity of the imagery is limited because it uses your phone's processor for rendering the views on the phone display screen.

Google Daydream and Samsung GearVR improved the platforms by requiring more performant minimum specifications including greater processing power in the mobile phone. GearVR's headsets include motion sensors to assist the phone device. These devices also introduced a three-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) hand controller that can be used like a laser pointer within VR experiences.

The next generation of mobile VR devices includes all-in-one headsets, like Oculus Go, with embedded screens and processors, eliminating the need for a separate mobile phone. Newer models may include depth sensors and spatial mapping processors to track the user's location in 3D space.

The bottom line is, the projects in this book will explore features from the high end to the low end of the consumer VR device spectrum. But generally, our projects do not demand a lot of processing power nor do they require high-end VR capability, so you can begin developing for VR on any of these types of devices, including Google Cardboard and an ordinary mobile phone.

If you are interested in developing VR applications for Google Daydream on Android directly in Java rather than through the Unity game engine, please also refer to another of the author's books, Cardboard VR Projects for Android from Packt Publishing (https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/cardboard-vr-projects-android).