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A new book by the author of Smithsonian Maker Lab that explores the realities of virtual reality, explaining what VR is and how it works. Includes an app download for five exclusive VR experiences and a cardboard viewer with stickers to make it your own.

Learn about the history of VR, from how it was invented to how it is used in the world today—beyond smart phone apps—and how VR headsets play with your senses of sight, sound, and touch to fool you into thinking you are somewhere else. Then use the included VR viewer and smartphone app download to come face-to-face with a T. rex, look inside a volcano, explore the Roman Colosseum, hop aboard the International Space Station, and peek under the surface of a pond.

Created in association with an educational VR company, this groundbreaking book from DK explains everything you need to know. Are you ready to be transported?

An in-depth look at virtual reality and how it can be harnessed to improve our everyday lives.

Virtual reality is able to effectively blur the line between reality and illusion, pushing the limits of our imagination and granting us access to any experience imaginable. With well-crafted simulations, these experiences, which are so immersive that the brain believes they’re real, are already widely available with a VR headset and will only become more accessible and commonplace. But how does this new medium affect its users, and does it have a future beyond fantasy and escapism?

In Experience on Demand, Jeremy Bailenson draws on two decades spent researching the psychological effects of VR and other mass media to help readers understand this powerful new tool. He offers expert guidelines for interacting with VR and describes the profound ways this technology can be put to use―not to distance ourselves from reality, but to enrich our lives and influence us to treat others, the environment, and even ourselves better. In the world of VR, a football quarterback plays a game against a competing team hundreds of times before even stepping onto the field; members of the United Nations embody a young girl in a refugee camp going through her day-to-day life; and veterans once again walk through the streets where they had experienced trauma.

There are dangers and many unknowns in using VR, but it also can help us hone our performance, recover from trauma, improve our learning and communication abilities, and enhance our empathic and imaginative capacities. Like any new technology, its most incredible uses might be waiting just around the corner. Experience on Demand is the definitive look at the risks and potential of VR―a must-read for navigating both the virtual and the physical worlds ahead.

A Wired senior editor and virtual reality expert presents a captivating, candid glimpse into the future "realities" of this emerging technology: how we will use it to form previously impossible relationships, explore new frontiers of intimacy, and how it will forever change human connection.

Heralded as the most significant technological innovation since the smartphone, virtual reality is poised to transform our very notions of life and humanity. Though this tech is still in its infancy, to those on the inside, it is the future. VR will change how we work, how we experience entertainment, how we feel pleasure and other emotions, how we see ourselves, and most importantly, how we relate to each other in the real world. And we will never be the same.

Peter Rubin, senior culture editor for Wired and the industry’s go-to authority on the subject, calls it an "intimacy engine." While once we needed another person to feel the sensations of closeness, trust, vulnerability, confidence, and titillation, VR will give us the ability to induce these sensations by ourselves for the first time in human history. This metamorphosis, Rubin argues, is going to have a powerful impact on relationships that will ripple throughout our society and our individual lives.

A journey into this uncertain future and a glimpse at the cultural implications and promises of a new reality, Future Presence explores a host of complex questions about what makes us human, what connects us, and what is real. Offering a glimpse into the mind-blowing things happening in universities, labs, and tech companies around the world, Rubin leads readers on an entertaining tour of the weirdest, wildest corners of this fascinating new universe. Describing this book as "half travelogue and half crystal ball", Rubin will:

• Introduce readers to the creators and consumers of VR technology
• Show readers what an experience is like inside the current VR devices
• Explain how this technology will upend everything we know about human connection in the future

At once the incredible, inevitable story of virtual reality’s rise and a look towards the future of our fantasies, Future Presence is a deeply personal examination of what connects us, and an analysis of what relationships, empathy, and sex could look like—sooner than we think.

Storytelling for Virtual Reality serves as a bridge between students of new media and professionals working between the emerging world of VR technology and the art form of classical storytelling. Rather than examining purely the technical, the text focuses on the narrative and how stories can best be structured, created, and then told in virtual immersive spaces. Author John Bucher examines the timeless principles of storytelling and how they are being applied, transformed, and transcended in Virtual Reality. Interviews, conversations, and case studies with both pioneers and innovators in VR storytelling are featured, including  industry leaders at LucasFilm, 20th Century Fox, Oculus, Insomniac Games, and Google.

For more information about story, Virtual Reality, this book, and its author, please visit StorytellingforVR.com

Explore the world of Virtual Reality by building immersive and fun VR projects using Unity 3D

Key Features

• 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

Book Description

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!

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

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.

Table of Contents

1. Virtually Everything for Everyone
2. Objects & Scale
3. VR Build and Run
4. Gaze-based Control
5. World Space UI
6. First-person Character
7. Physics & the Environment
8. Walk-throughs & Rendering
9. Using All 360 Degrees
10. Social VR Metaverse
11. What's Next?

Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, & Vox

The father of virtual reality explains its dazzling possibilities by reflecting on his own lifelong relationship with technology

Bridging the gap between tech mania and the experience of being inside the human body, Dawn of the New Everything is a look at what it means to be human at a moment of unprecedented technological possibility.

Through a fascinating look back over his life in technology, Jaron Lanier, an interdisciplinary scientist and father of the term “virtual reality,” exposes VR’s ability to illuminate and amplify our understanding of our species, and gives readers a new perspective on how the brain and body connect to the world. An inventive blend of autobiography, science writing, philosophy and advice, this book tells the wild story of his personal and professional life as a scientist, from his childhood in the UFO territory of New Mexico, to the loss of his mother, the founding of the first start-up, and finally becoming a world-renowned technological guru.

Understanding virtual reality as being both a scientific and cultural adventure, Lanier demonstrates it to be a humanistic setting for technology. While his previous books offered a more critical view of social media and other manifestations of technology, in this book he argues that virtual reality can actually make our lives richer and fuller.

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• Another Man's Shoes (understanding others)
• Opening Day (God's leading)
• Blackgaard's Revenge 1 & 2 (recognizing deception)
• The Buck Starts Here (using resources wisely)
• Something Cliqued between Us (including others)
• The Eternal Birthday (too much of a good thing)
• Bethany's Imaginary Friend (imagination is healthy)
• The Y.A.K. Problem (worry)
• Blind Girl's Bluff (honesty)
• Where There's Smoke (positive role models)
• The Virtual Kid (enjoying life)
• You Win Some, You Lose Some (being a good example)
• The Treasure Room (valuing people)
• Chain Reaction (consequences of irresponsibility)