Preface

Virtual Reality, from a computer standpoint, has been around since the 1960s. It started up again in a big way in the late 90's, and then mostly collapsed for a while—although it's never really gone away. It is back now, and, this time, it is here to stay.

What has made this change is the cell phone—the large, high-resolution display technology used in cell phones has helped created HMDs (Head Mounted Displays, or VR Goggles). Circuits and computers are also vastly faster than they used to be; computer graphics that used to cost a quarter of a million dollars in 1998 now costs less than two thousand and is even faster.

Building VR worlds has always been difficult, however. You had to be a C++ programmer and know an immense amount about high speed programming, real-time graphics, geometry, and other complex topics. This has been simplified in the last few years with game development engines—simplified, but only to a point. 

With React VR, it is even simpler. You can code a VR world now using React syntax, a simple declarative HTML-like language. If you want to create a box, you just declare a box with the right width, height, and so forth, instead of having to write procedural code. The syntax may be simple, but these worlds can be event driven, animated, and responsive to user input as well as obtaining information from the web.

This will enable you to build complex virtual worlds with simple JavaScript and HTML-like code. This uses a new browser-based programming paradigm called WebVR; regular browsers on PCs and on mobile devices can now view worlds in VR.

You can do this too, and this book will show you how.