Recording Virtual Reality Videos

In this chapter, we’re going to be building on what we've already done with our animated show by utilizing the animation in a variety of different ways. The best part about animation is that it allows you to create experiences in VR, but then also record those as videos that you could play on a variety of different platforms. These platforms could be a local storage device, such as a mobile phone or a computer playing a video through a media player, or you could upload the video to a service such as YouTube or Vimeo and play it as a strip on a streaming platform. Since Unity is a real-time rendering engine, you can play that animation in real time, as we saw in the previous chapter. But you’re not limited to that, and that’s the best part about working in Unity and working on VR experiences. The same content that we create for VR can be rendered and saved as a video to play as a video file, or ported to a console to be played...

Technical requirements

The complete source code for this chapter can be found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Enhancing-Virtual-Reality-Experiences-with-Unity-2022/tree/main/EnhancingVRExperiencesFullProject/Assets/_VRProjectAssets/Scenes/Chapter_14.

Working with the Unity Recorder

In order to utilize the animated clip that we made, we have to turn that into a video file so that we can play it in a variety of different settings. The best way to do that is using the Unity Recorder.

The Unity Recorder is a built-in tool in Unity that allows you to record gameplay footage and save it as video files or image sequences. It can capture a variety of output types, including screen captures, cameras, and audio sources. You can set up different recording sessions with various settings, such as Resolution, Frame Rate, and File Format. The Unity Recorder is useful for creating gameplay trailers, tutorials, and other promotional videos, as well as for debugging and analyzing game behavior.

In this section, we will first download the Unity Recorder from the Unity Package Manager, and then we will add it to our scene. After we’ve done that, we will create a new Unity Recorder track to Unity Timeline we have for our animation, use...

Building a VR theater experience

So, you may be wondering why we’re going to create a theater experience in VR when you could just go to the theater. I think one of the values and beauties of VR, especially given the COVID pandemic, is that it is able to give people experiences that mimic the real-world places they want to go to but can’t, right at home or wherever they may be limited to for a while. During the pandemic, people wanted that theater experience with surround sound and the ability to look around and see a huge screen. But they weren’t able to do that because everything was shut down. VR can mitigate that. And because we have our animated scene created in the previous chapter, we can utilize that and put it on a big screen for a movie theater experience in the comfort of your living room. All you have to do is put on a headset and enjoy everything that comes with the theater experience. More importantly, you don’t have to deal with noisy people...

Creating a 360° video

Having 360° video in VR is quite interesting. You get to see that a lot in virtual tours, and you also see it in VR roller coasters. One of the best parts about having 360° video is that it makes videos much more accessible because you don’t need a headset to have 360° video experiences. You can actually have those experiences on a web browser using tools from YouTube and a variety of other sources.

In this section, we will use the Unity Recorder to create a 360° video file from our animated show, much as we did with the animated show MP4 file. Then, we will add metadata to it so that the platforms we play the 360° video on understand that it’s a 360° video. After that, we can upload it to a video source such as YouTube to stream and share.

To record a 360° video of the animated scene, follow these steps:

1. Duplicate the recorder track and disable the original recorder track.
2. Click on the recorder...

Summary

Using Phase 8 of our roadmap as a guideline, we were able to explore how we can utilize our animated show assets in a variety of different ways. We first learned how to use the Unity Recorder to record our animated real-time rendered shell assets as a video file. Once we had that video file, we could place it on a big screen in a VR theater that we created. Then, we were able to convert that animated show into a 360° video file that we could use on 360° video players or upload to YouTube to stream 360° videos across the world and share them with friends.

At this point, you should understand that developing VR experiences is not limited to just headsets or mobile devices. You can create experiences through 360° video and streaming services that can be accessed on a variety of different platforms and devices. When thinking about what kinds of VR experiences to make, think hard about the options available because, in this chapter, we explored different options...