Playing with VR and Unity

Today, Virtual Reality (VR) may be the hottest topic for interactive developers (Augmented Reality will be the next within few years for sure). Many constructors propose their own Head Mounted Device (HMD) : HTC & Valve with the Vive, Oculus, with their Oculus Rift and Gear VR for Samsung mobiles, Google and the very cheap DIY Google Cardboard, and many other ones. Naturally, Unity, which is the leading global game industry software (45% market share, 47% of developers), rapidly proposed built-in functionnalities to handle some of the VR devices.

In the end of the last year, we have been asked to create Unity tools to quickly prototype virtual visits with the Google Cardboard. It was the perfect project to dive deeper in the world of VR. Here, virtual visits were a set of photo-spheres and video-spheres, which are respectively photos and videos projected inside spheres, giving you the impression you are surrounded by the scenery (think about Google Street View). Furthemore, some parts of the photo-spheres had to be interactive and display some additional content like photos, videos, text, …

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