Explore the world of Virtual Reality by building immersive and fun VR projects using Unity 3D About This Book * Learn the basic principles of virtual reality applications and get to know how they differ from games and desktop apps * Build various types of VR experiences, including diorama, first-person characters, riding on rails, 360 degree projections, and social VR * A project-based guide that teaches you to use Unity to develop VR applications, which can be experienced with devices such as the Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard Who This Book Is For If you're a non-programmer unfamiliar with 3D computer graphics, or experienced in both but new to virtual reality, and are interested in building your own VR games or applications then this book is for you. Any experience in Unity is an advantage. What You Will Learn * Create 3D scenes with Unity and Blender while learning about world space and scale * Build and run VR applications for consumer headsets including Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard * Build interactive environments with physics, gravity, animations, and lighting using the Unity engine * Experiment with various user interface (UI) techniques that you can use in your VR applications * Implement the first-person and third-person experiences that use only head motion gestures for input * Create animated walkthroughs, use 360-degree media, and build multi-user social VR experiences * Learn about the technology and psychology of VR including rendering, performance and VR motion sickness * Gain introductory and advanced experience in Unity programming with the C# language In Detail What is consumer "virtual reality"? Wearing a head-mounted display you view stereoscopic 3D scenes. You can look around by moving your head, and walk around using hand controls or motion sensors. You are engaged in a fully immersive experience. On the other hand, Unity is a powerful game development engine that provides a rich set of features such as visual lighting, materials, physics, audio, special effects, and animation for creating 2D and 3D games. Unity 5 has become the leading platform for building virtual reality games, applications and experiences for this new generation of consumer VR devices. Using a practical and project-based approach, this book will educate you about the specifics of virtual reality development in Unity. You will learn how to use Unity to develop VR applications which can be experienced with devices such as the Oculus Rift or Google Cardboard. We will then learn how to engage with virtual worlds from a third person and first person character point of view. Furthermore, you will explore the technical considerations especially important and possibly unique to VR. The projects in the book will demonstrate how to build a variety of VR experiences. You will be diving into the Unity 3D game engine via the interactive Unity Editor as well as C-Sharp programming. By the end of the book, you will be equipped to develop rich, interactive virtual reality experiences using Unity. So, let's get to it! Style and approach This book takes a practical, project-based approach to teach specifics of virtual reality development in Unity. Using a reader-friendly approach, this book will not only provide detailed step-by-step instructions but also discuss the broader context and applications covered within.

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Unveil the world of mixed reality with HoloLens About This Book * Bring holographic insights to existing line-of-business applications, tools, and workflows * Focus on developing end-to-end realistic holographic application. * Build interactive model scripts and test them in Unity3D and holographic emulators Who This Book Is For This book is targeted at developers and designers working on mixed-reality developments for complex integrated scenarios using HoloLens. What You Will Learn * Interact with holograms using different interaction models * Develop your first holographic app * Integrate holographic applications with cloud systems * Visualize data feeds coming from the cloud through holograms * Manage the application distribution of enterprise-enabled HoloLens * Integrate HoloLens applications with services deployed on Azure * Identify and create 3D Assets and Scenes * Use HoloLens to explore the Internet of Things In Detail Do you want to create stunning applications with HoloLens? Are you a developer who is fascinated with Microsoft HoloLens and its capabilities? If so, this is the book for you. This book introduces and demystifies the HoloLens platform and shows you different ways of interaction with computers (mixed-reality). You will start your mixed-reality journey by understanding different types of digital reality. You will learn to build your first holographic app. Also, you will understand holographic application integration possibilities within Line of Business Applications using Azure. Moving ahead, you will create Integrated Solutions using IoT with HoloLens. Gradually you'll learn how to create and deploy apps on a device. You will learn to publish application to the store; if you are an enterprise developer, you will also manage and distribute applications for enterprise-enabled or domain-joined HoloLens. Finally, you will develop an end-to-end realistic holographic app, ranging from scenario identification to sketching, development, deployment, and, finally, production. Style and approach The book is a project-based guide to help you to create some really astonishing mixed-reality applications. It will provide end-to-end solutions and enable you to build stunning applications for HoloLens.

Explore the new frontier of virtual reality with the Oculus Rift and bring the VR revolution to your own projects About This Book * Create immersive 3D games especially designed for the Oculus Rift platform * Build complex realistic virtual reality (VR) games with the Unity Engine * Create striking VR environments with advanced graphical techniques Who This Book Is For This book is for aspiring indie developers and VR enthusiasts who want to bring their ideas into virtual reality with a new platform that provides an unprecedented level of realism and immersion. What You Will Learn * Increase immersion with 3D audio and intuitive interfaces * Create group VR experiences using multi-player networking * Design fun and engaging mechanics that utilize VR principles * Explore the best ways to navigate and interact using the Oculus Rift * Design intuitive ways to navigate and interact with scenes in VR * Add stunning realism to a scene with three-dimensional audio * Invent mechanics and features that take full advantage of VR hardware In Detail Virtual reality (VR) is changing the world of gaming and entertainment as we know it. VR headsets such as the Oculus Rift immerse players in a virtual world by tracking their head movements and simulating depth, giving them the feeling that they are actually present in the environment. We will first use the Oculus SDK in the book and will then move on to the widely popular Unity Engine, showing you how you can add that extra edge to your VR games using the power of Unity. In this book, you'll learn how to take advantage of this new medium by designing around each of its unique features. This book will demonstrate the Unity 5 game engine, one of most widely-used engines for VR development, and will take you through a comprehensive project that covers everything necessary to create and publish a complete VR experience for the Oculus Rift. You will also be able to identify the common perils and pitfalls of VR development to ensure that your audience has the most comfortable experience possible. By the end of the book, you will be able to create an advanced VR game for the Oculus Rift, and you'll have everything you need to bring your ideas into a new reality. Style and approach This book takes a step-by-step tutorial approach with illustrative examples to help you implement the projects on your own. The book lets you first get to grips with the Oculus SDK and then moves on to the Unity Engine to add realistic graphics and features in your games.

Save time and resources by getting to know the best practices and intelligence from industry experts About This Book * This book helps you gain a fresh perspective through a recipe-based approach on the new Microsoft Server 2016 Hyper-V * Over 80 recipes to help you master the administrative tasks of Hyper-V and get to grips with advanced solutions and techniques for virtualization * These hands-on advanced recipes will help you deploy, maintain, and upgrade Hyper-V virtual machines Who This Book Is For This book is for Hyper-V administrators who are looking to take advantage of all exciting new features that Microsoft Server 2016 Hyper-V has to offer. What You Will Learn * Installing and managing Hyper-V Server in Full, Server Core, and Nano Server * Migrating and upgrading physical and virtual machines * Configuring network, memory, security, and auditing settings for virtual machines * High availability and disaster recovery * Saving time and money with PowerShell automation * The new features around network and nested virtualization, distributed storage QoS, Hyper-V Replica, and much more * Monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting with Hyper-V 2016 best practices * Deploying and automating multiple VMs and support Windows Hyper-V 2016 clusters through different installation methods In Detail Hyper-V 2016 is full of new features and updates. The second of our best-selling Hyper-V books, the Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V Cookbook has it all covered. Brimming with expert solutions and techniques, you'll have everything you need to master virtualization and Hyper-V Manager. This Hyper-V book is designed to help advanced-level administrators benefit fully from the new Windows Server. With over 80 hands-on recipes, the Hyper-V Cookbook gives you tips, tricks and best practices to deploy, maintain and upgrade your virtual machines. Style and approach This advanced-level book provides step-by-step recipes on real-world examples so you can get practical, hands-on experience of the subjects.

Create interactive and intuitiveness HoloLens applications with ease About This Book * Start developing immersive and interactive apps for Microsoft HoloLens * Explore the Windows Universal Development platform for HoloLens development * Leverage the full set of HoloLens sensors to create mesmerizing apps Who This Book Is For If you are a developer new to Windows Universal development platform and want to get started with HoloLens development, then this is the book for you. No prior experience of C# programming or of the .NET framework is needed to get started with this book. What You Will Learn * Write an app that responds to verbal commands * Communicate between devices in the boundaries of the UWP model * Create sounds in the app and place them in a 3D space * Build simple apps that display holograms * Interact with the physical environment while taking physical boundaries into account In Detail HoloLens revolutionizes the way we work and interact with the virtual world. HoloLens brings you the amazing world of augmented reality and provides an opportunity to explore it like never before. This is the best book for developers who want to start creating interactive and intuitive augmented reality apps for the HoloLens platform. You will start with a walkthrough of the HoloLens hardware before creating your first app. Next you will be introduced to the various HoloLens sensors and find out how to program them efficiently so that they can interact with the real world seamlessly. Moving on, you will learn how to create smart animations and add video overlay that implements real-time tracking and motion-sensing abilities to your HoloLens app. Finally, you will learn how to test your app effectively. Style and approach This book takes a step-by-step tutorial-style approach. It will guide you through every step with practical examples and make sure that you are confident enough to create your own HoloLens app from scratch by the end of the book.

Design, develop and deploy a highly available vSphere environment for VMware Horizon View About This Book * Enhance your capability of meeting various Service Level Agreements in VMware Horizon View * Get acquainted through all the necessary considerations for building a View environment * Cover VMware High Availability hurdle by hurdle along with the checklists for verification of the environment being ready for production Who This Book Is For If you manage, plan or deploy VMware Horizon View or are looking for tips for best practices and configuration details this book is for you. This book is intended for administrators who design and deploy VMware Horizon View or administrators who are looking for ways to improve their existing View environment. What You Will Learn * Install and configure a VMware Horizon View Connection Server and redundant pair * Discover the networking requirements for View and learn how to build redundancy into your network * Analyze each of the View user pool types and how each one can be made highly available and survivable. * Get to know about storage protocols such as NFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel * Deploy Virtual SAN, and find out how to effectively couple Virtual SAN with View * Learn about View monitoring tools to allow fast responses to various crises * Plan, analyze and upgrade VMware Horizon View * Analyze network services required for VMware Horizon View and build them in a redundant manner In Detail The increasing movement to virtualize workloads and workstations has put VMware Horizon View into a central mission critical role in many environments. Administrators may be overwhelmed with planning for outages and dealing with failure scenarios. It's easy to miss small details that will result in outages down the road. Following VMware Horizon View best practices and planning ahead with network infrastructure will allow you to avoid these common pit falls. This book will walk you through the setup and configuration of View in a highly available configuration. It will provide you with the skills to analyze and deploy configurations that can stand up to rigorous failure standards. The book starts with deploying and basic configuration of VMware Horizon View in a redundant setup, then moves on to cover high availability for networking, fibre channel, NFS, and iSCSI. We finish this book with monitoring and upgrade planning. At the end we also learn about maintaining the uptime and minimizing the downtime that can be caused due to various factors. Each topic comes with a list of best practices and failure scenarios to test. Administrators will learn the intricacies of protecting a View environment. Style and approach This book provides configuration and installation steps for administration and installation of a Horizon View server. It includes high-level overviews of any protocols, services used by Horizon View, and best practices and high availability checklists for each chapter.

The idea of virtual realities has a long and complex historical trajectory, spanning from Plato's concept of the cave and the simulacrum, to artistic styles such as Trompe L'oeil, and more recently developments in 3D film, television and gaming. However, this book will pay particular attention to the time between the 1980s to the 1990s when virtual reality and cyberspace were represented, particularly in fiction, as a wondrous technology that enabled transcendence from the limitations of physical embodiment. The purpose of this critical historical analysis of representations of virtual reality is to examine how they might deny, repress or overlook embodied experience. Specifically, the author will contend that embodiment is a fundamental aspect of immersion in virtual reality, rather than something which is to be transcended. In this way, the book aims to challenge distorted ideas about transcendence and productively contribute to debates about embodiment and technology.

This book is a step-by-step tutorial filled with practical examples which will show readers how to configure and manage IaaS and DBaaS with Oracle Enterprise Manager. If you are a cloud administrator or a user of self-service provisioning systems offered by Enterprise Manager, this book is ideal for you. It will also help administrators who want to understand the chargeback mechanism offered by Enterprise Manager.An understanding of the basic building blocks of cloud computing such as networking, virtualization, storage, and so on, is needed by those of you interested in this book

An easy-to-use guide, filled with tutorials that will teach you how to set up and use iCloud, and profit from all of its marvellous features. This book is for anyone with basic knowledge of computers and mobile operations. Prior knowledge of cloud computing or iCloud is not expected.

This book uses a step by step approach to teach you how to design, deploy, and manage a Horizon Workspace based on real world experience. Written in an easy to follow style, this book explains the terminology in a clear and concise manner. Each feature is explained starting at a high level and then drilling down into the technical detail, using diagrams and screenshots. This book is perfect for IT administrators who want to deploy a solution to centrally manage access to corporate applications, data, and virtual desktops using Horizon Workspace. You need to have some experience in delivering BYOD initiatives and delivering applications from the Cloud (SaaS).

How much time does your organization waste in unfocused, unengaging and unproductive virtual meetings?

Virtual meetings are on the rise. Unfortunately, most meeting leaders don't know the strategies for executing masterful virtual meetings. As a result, most virtual meetings: Don't start on time because people have difficulty with the technology Don't have a defined purpose due to lack of preparation Don't keep people engaged due to escalated multi-tasking Don't address conflict because the leader often doesn't see the body language information that communicates silent disagreement Don't deal with dysfunction because the meeting leader is distracted with the technology

CLICK for Strategies

"CLICK: The Virtual Meetings Book" provides meeting leaders with 60 comprehensive strategies for planning and executing masterful virtual meetings. In its twelve chapters, you'll find strategies and answers to these questions and more: How do you keep engagement high in a virtual meeting? How do you eliminate unnecessary virtual meetings? What are the key features that differentiate various online meeting platforms? How do you reduce the likelihood that your meeting will be derailed by technical issues? What if only a few people are remote? Or, what if you, the meeting leader, are the only one remote? How do you ask questions that receive lots of responses instead of that dreaded silence? What are the common virtual meeting dysfunctions, and how do you prevent them? How do you make sure you get quality results from every virtual meeting?

Authors Michael Wilkinson and Richard Smith, leaders in the #1 meeting facilitation and facilitation training company in the US, show you how to deliver masterful virtual meetings, every time.

Virtual Reality (VR) was created to fulfill human curiosity about exploring beyond the reality. Humans establish the experiences of a real world based on the feedbacks from sense organs, such as eyes, ears, nose and hands. By replacing real images, sound and tactility with computer-generated illusions, a virtual world can be built for the human user to navigate in and interact with. In this book, the authors gather current research from across the globe in the study of virtual reality including education processes implemented in the simulated environment of the laboratory; an intuitive 3D interface infrastructure for virtual reality applications; virtual environments for the visualization of cultural and archaeological heritage; virtual reality in psychotherapy and autism and virtual reality as a tool for machining-processes simulation and in the textile field.

This is the story of the life and experiences of Fran's avatar, Ayo. Ayo is her name within Second Life. Ayo will first describe what Second Life is, how she and Fran relate, then she will tell stories of her experiences in Second Life with each of them illustrating a point about life in Second Life. All these themes are centered around the encounter of Ayo with her "twin soul" Ludwig and the reactions of their Real Life creators hidden behind their laptops. A touch of romance thrown in... What will Ayo and Ludwig's future be ? makes Ayo's Aventures pleasant and interesting to read.

Step into the world of virtual reality with your newly created avatar and begin to experience the tools that make this world interactive! During their infancy stage, virtual environments were largely based upon the gaming community and over time have been adapted to meet the growing number of users and educators. The Virtual Worlds Handbook, with CD-ROM, provides a user-friendly approach that will help trainers and educators create an effective and interactive environment within the Second Life virtual world. This book was written to help the novice user tackle the natural learning curve while providing the experienced user with tips, tools, and tricks to help any educator or trainer meet their professional goals faster. The opportunities using virtual reality are limitless and provide online students with a unique opportunity to connect both physically and educationally to one another, to faculty, to university, and to a worldwide market.

This book gathers a collection of selected works and new research results of scholars and graduate students presented at the 6th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR 2022) via the Internet, during July 22-24 2022, hosted and organized by Sojo University in conjunction with other three universities and Beijing Huaxia Rongzhi Blockchain Technology Institute. The focus of the book is interdisciplinary in nature and includes research on all aspects of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, from fundamental development to the applied system. The book covers topics such as system techniques, performance, and implementation; content creation and modelling; cognitive aspects, perception, user behaviour; AI technologies; interactions, interactive and responsive environments; AI/VR applications and case studies.

Drag those windows from your screen and into the air in front of you. Use a simple glance to switch lights, open doors or surf the web. Virtual devices, virtual objects will surround us, anywhere. Only one piece of real hardware will do it all, replace anything. From application concepts to technical design to even a fiction chapter carrying us into the future, "this book is a blueprint for an entire technology." The new edition has been greatly extended, with many new ideas and materials. From the foreword by Oliver Bimber, professor of augmented reality: "I was captivated by the last edition of 'The End of Hardware' on a round-trip flight to Los Angeles. This book is not only an in-depth introduction to the concept of head-attached displays for augmented reality (AR), but also a great source of inspiration for many professionals - at least it is for me. Being a technical guy, I particularly enjoyed reading the technical design chapter which, in this new edition of the book, has been greatly extended with many details on holography, light fields and MEMS. Despite a technological focus, the book is written in a popular-scientific style - and therefore allows easy access to the material - even for non-experts. If I were to characterize this book in a single word, that word would be 'inspiring'. I can only hope that one day, someone will pick up and realize these ideas. For although, this might not be the 'End of Hardware' - it could well be the beginning of many new and exciting interfaces to the digital world in which we all live in."

The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online.

Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created.

Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? "Lindens" as the Linden Lab employees call themselves found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions.

In Making Virtual Worlds, Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab."