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/Essential Components of a VR Environment
Essential Components of a VR Environment
Get a brief introduction to VR fundamentals.
In our physical world, we use actual objects to construct an environment. When someone says classroom, for example, our eyes might immediately wander around the room, looking for a board, projector, classroom desks, and an instructor. Similarly, if we’re to create a virtual classroom environment, it must have the required components. In this lesson, we’ll cover the essential components needed to build an interactive virtual environment.
Virtual environment (assets)
The virtual environment, like any other real environment, requires assets. For example, we’ll need classroom-specific assets to build a classroom. Similarly, assets such as moon craters and a virtual space depicting the universe will be required to replicate lunar flight. So, where do we get these assets from? Unity and Unreal Engine are the most popular development platforms, and both of them have their online asset stores that offer free and paid assets.
Other popular asset stores are Sketchfab, Kenney Assets, OpenGameArt, and more. The following illustration combines a house, grass, sky, well, and cloud assets stitched together via an IDE like Unity 3D or Unreal Engine to create a virtual world depicted below:
All environments will require several assets to be included in the scene. If the project requires highly realistic assets that aren’t available off-the-shelf on the online asset stores then we may consider hiring a 3D artist to design customized assets for our scene.
Player (virtual characters/agents)
In most role-playing games, the user controls and interacts with the environment through a virtual character. These virtual characters can be avatars or fictitious characters made by the game developer. It can walk around, interact with the environment, and teleport to different regions (within the scene) or a new scene.
Generally, the experience or story in VR games revolves around these virtual humanoid characters. VR experiences may also require some characters with automated behaviors and interactions controlled by computer algorithms. These characters ...