Google has expanded its Daydream Elements program, and has distilled all of its development thus far into a blog post and accompanying video. Daydream Elements, a fundamental set of best practices for Daydream which all come with open-source examples and editor code, was first introduced at this year’s Google I/O. Since then, it has been expanded out into a full-on ecosystem, a base upon which developers can build to create compelling VR experiences. All of this comes pre-built and ready to transfer into your content creation engine. Daydream Elements is made, more than anything, to answer a few fundamental questions about the way that some things in VR work, and provide would-be VR pioneers with an easy-to-use toolkit.
Daydream Elements, in its current iteration, handles movement either by teleportation, through a chase camera, or by tunneling; a user uses the Daydream remote to point where they want to go, and a button click or other action sends them on their way. While the teleportation method is self-explanatory, the tunneling method actually obscures most of the user’s view in order to help prevent VR sickness. A chase camera, on the other hand, takes a user out of the action and into a third-person view. While this does break the immersion of VR quite easily, it can help to prevent VR sickness by pulling the player away, and making movement deliberate. Google also includes some user interaction basics for users to play with, such as swipe menus driven by the Daydream remote’s touchpad. A menu brought up with a click is also included.
The final piece of Daydream Elements is the Daydream Renderer, a rendering program that takes advantage of Daydream’s graphical fidelity and the massive amounts of memory on offer in modern devices. The Daydream Renderer specializes in lighting, and can help a developer to more easily deploy a basic engine with effects and rules that will help it to work more naturally with objects. Daydream, as an ecosytem, was built hand in hand with Epic Games and Unity, making Unreal Engine 4 and Unity some of the easiest, and fastest ways to create compelling VR experiences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=y3uVATlRcqc