How to create VR Video player Android app with Google Cardboard SDK for Unity

Hi everyone, VR 360 video become more and more popular in the world than ever, all of us know about the vr 360 video. But what happen with people who want to watch virtual reality video? They have to connect to Youtube app!

What about creating a VR video player app for android ?

With the experience of a android developers, I have to tell you that it is very easy and easy to get money from selling this app too. With this kind of app, people can watch vr 360 video right on their smartphone with no the Internet connection!

Smoothier, lighter and cheaper!

People are thirsty to experience new things from VR technology, some of my friend develop some very simple VR app but still get quite good income.

So in this post, I will show you how to create VR Video player Android app with Google Cardboard SDK for Unity!

Create VR Video player Android app with Google Cardboard SDK for Unity

There are 3 steps for you to create VR video player android app with Google Cardboard SDK for Unity

  1. Add a sphere with an equirectangular UV mapping and inward facing normals around the camera.
  2. Purchase a plugin to play a movie on that sphere’s texture. I recommend Easy Movie Texture.
  3. Use mp4s or ogg vorbis files that are compatible with the platform. This is phone and OS dependent.

At first , Easy Movie Texture take me a lot of time before I can apply it, however, finally I get familiar with it and use it well. Hehe, and now do you know that now my app run very well on my Iphone? This is the result that I haven’r respect before !

Easy Movie Texture Tutorial

I don’t know if you work on Windows environment, but on Mac you can follow this short tutorial of how to use Easy Movie Texture

Download the Easy Movie Texture plug-in from the Unity Asset Store

  1. Open the Demo Sphere demo scene from Assets/EasyMovieTexture/Scene
  2. Create a new (empty) Prefab to your project, and drag the Sphere GameObject from the Demo Sphere scene onto the Prefab.
  3. Reopen your Cardboard scene and drag the new videosphere prefab into your hierarchy.
  4. Open your source 360-video in Quicktime
  5. File -> Export -> 720p
  6. Change file extension from ‘.mov’ to ‘.mp4’
  7. Drag your new mp4 file into your projects Assets/Streaming Assets directory. Note: don’t import through the menu system, as this will force Unity to convert to OGG.
  8. On the “Media Player Ctrl” script component of your videosphere GameObject, locate the “Str_File_Name” field and provide the FULL filename. Make sure to include the extension as part of the string, “mymovie.mp4”.

Free resource that you will love

Here are some useful resource I think that can help you a lot with VR technology:

That’s all of tasks that I have did to make it works, hehe!

One last note, you can only view the video on the phone, not in preview in the editor. It would be better if it didn’t work this way, but really once the initial issues of resolution and placement are resolved, I don’t really need to see the video every time I run the scene in the editor.