The preparation of graphic models for a virtual reality application in Unity

Although Virtual Reality has existed for decades, it is currently experiencing a boom. This is mainly due to the new powerful hardware devices available to many people. Accompanying this greater availability, the fields of use are also currently expanding – medicine, military, business, engineering, education, entertainment, etc. The main purpose of Virtual Reality is to provide the user with a real-looking simulated environment, including interaction. Specialised developer software tools are used in order to create Virtual Reality applications that exploit suitable 3D graphics models. This paper deals with the creation and preparation of such graphical models - including textures, and the problems of the conversion process, to a developer application. Blender is used to create models and UV maps. The export of these models and UV maps from Blender is set up for easy implementation in the Substance Painter software, where the textures are drawn - and later, into the Unity developer engine for Virtual Reality application. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Virtual training environments in a printing company

Although Virtual Reality technology has existed for decades, it has currently been experiencing a boom. This is - in particular, ensured by significant improvements in the availability and quality of Virtual Reality (VR) hardware that this technology requires. Virtual Reality is quickly expanding in many fields of human interests - scientific visualisation, the military, entertainment, healthcare, construction, etc. It is also increasingly being used in education and training. With the help of VR, industrial companies can train their employees to work more effectively, to improve their performance or to perform safe training programmes in high-risk scenarios. This paper sets out to describe proposed and implemented solutions for the use of VR for the new employee training process in a printing company. This solution includes the choice of a suitable VR headset and corresponding software tools. After that, the necessary graphical assets were prepared - (e.g. 3D models and their textures); these were then imported into the software in which the VR application was created. Its functionality was then tested in our laboratory and will be used in the relevant industrial environment. © 2020, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG