Chapter 8. Building the World and Optimizing for VR

Through the course of our work so far in this book, we've been focused for the most part on the player avatar. This makes sense—virtual reality dramatically changes the way the player engages with the world. We needed to learn new ways of enabling the player to get around, new ways of using their hands to interact with the world, and new ways of constructing user interfaces.

This is no small achievement, so congratulations for getting this far!

Now, we're going to shift our focus a bit and begin to look at the environment around us. Up to this point, we've been using existing environments, but now it's time to begin to build our own. As we do this, we are going to learn that environments in VR present challenges that we're going to need to address. Lighting, object scale, and sightlines all come into play to a greater degree than they do on the flat screen, and performance is a major consideration.

In this chapter, we're going to learn how...