9 Case Study: A VR Shader Editor
This chapter covers
- Creating a full-fledged VR application, putting what we’ve learned into practice
- Integrating Rift functionality with another application framework: Qt
9.1 Introduction
Up to this point, we’ve essentially been creating toy applications. Our demos are useful to a degree, but they’re very limited. If you’re building an application from the ground up, they might prove useful for experimentation, but if you have a pre-existing application you’re attempting to convert to VR, or are planning a more complex application, our simple example framework almost certainly isn’t suitable for production work.
To that end, in this chapter we’re going to create a more complete and useful application, both to illustrate the issues that can come up in more advanced cases and to serve as an example of the best practices that we’ve discussed so far.
9.2 Our starting application: Shadertoy
To demonstrate the art of a fully-formed VR application, we’re going to adapt an existing application into a VR context. The application we’ve chosen is Shadertoy[1], a web-based tool for editing OpenGL fragment shaders. Shadertoy was created by Iñigo Quilez and Pol Jeremias.