Top 5 guides for using Unity with Ricoh Theta

Jesse Casman Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 24, 2017

The future of storytelling is in AR/VR. And the tools already exist. If you’re comfortable with Unity and interested in importing and manipulating 360 degree content, here are 5 immediately useful guides for you.

For Unity novices, working on an AR/VR project may also be a great way to start learning. The first 3 out of 5 guides do not expect much prior knowledge of Unity. There’s nothing like a specific project to focus the mind and push you to learn skills that you wanted to learn all along.

This post focuses on 4 tips to help beginners dive into Unity. For example, here’s one piece of received wisdom: “Build with stored 360 media before using the camera API.”

In order to help developers use THETA images in their projects, this post focuses on 4 scenes, each which only takes a few minutes to build, to demonstrate using THETA images in Unity Skybox. This video tutorial covers the same steps.

Quote from the beginning of the post: “I finally figured out how to use an equirectangular 360 image as a skybox in Unity. It’s pretty cool (and surprisingly simple) — if you do it right, you should see the colors of the 360 image reflected on any CGI object you put into the scene, which will make the object look more real.”

This is a translation of a Japanese post on using Unity to view real-time 360 degree video streaming. Translator’s note: “I personally have very little experience with Unity, but the content and pictures were useful, so I translated the blog post for others to use. This is not an exact translation, but it should be much more clear than doing Google translate.”

Full fledged tutorial implementing 360 Live Streaming into a VR headset! But be careful, the post indicates this is easier said than done. “There are a lot of instructions/tutorials/guides out there but nothing that completely does what I wanted to do, so I figured I would write this up for anybody who wanted to do something similar using SteamVR or other VR API’s in Unity. … You could also adapt this solution to work with Oculus.”