VR Apps/Games And Scale..?

I've ordered an Unofficial Cardboard 2.0 Plus but won't get it in the post for a week or two.

I'm new to Unity and wonder if there's an easy way to get the scale of things right in VR or if it's just a case of trial and error changing the camera positions or physical size of the models and scenery..?

I'm just working through the Roll-A-Ball tutorial at the moment and once I've done that I'm going to have a look at doing one of those obligatory flying games that everyone seems to do when they first start messing around with VR games lol

But how do I go about getting the scale right..?

 

It's mostly trial and error. The units are arbitrary; usually 1 is considered "1 meter" in 3D graphics, but it could just as easily be "1 foot" or "1 inch".

 

Not in front of my PC at the moment but can you change the size of the camera itself..? Would be an easy way to change the scale of things. So in other words if you change the camera to a smaller size without changing the size of the models in the game they would appear bigger, and if you increase the camera size they would appear to be smaller.

 

That's just changing the position of the camera. It's as simple as things look smaller when the camera is further away.

 

No, I meant changing the physical size of the camera itself. If the size of the camera is halved but the distance between the camera and the object itself remains the same the object would look twice the size.

I'm just wondering how devs can make things in VR look so huge. The only two things I can think of is to decrease the size of the camera or increase the size of an object.

 

I created a test app using Cardboard for a potential client. The idea was to show their light show in a VR environment in New York City.

I used Google Maps / Google Earth to take some rough measurements and approximate heights of buildings and streets in the area. I then created models in Blender using those measurements with a 1:1 scale, and imported those models into Unity.

While I don't think it was perfect, it gave you a sense of scale well enough. I probably could have tinkered with the camera FOV a bit to strengthen the sense of scale a bit, but I focused more on adding animated traffic and hidden Rick Astley videos, and before I knew it the client's budget was cut and we didn't get the job, so the project got shelved.

In any case, the easiest way to show scale and make things seem big is to -- surprise, surprise -- make them big! If you're talking ridiculously huge things though, like planets, then you'll have to make the user smaller, drop your FOV, and use other cinema methods like forced perspective to fake it.

 

Great stuff. Thanks for the help everyone. I went back to my PC to see if you could change the scale of the camera object and you can. So if anyone else is thinking about making models look bigger than they actually are you can change the size of the Scale properties to less than 1.

So I reckon with a combination of that, making the actual models themselves bigger and forced perspective as mentioned by Schneider21 above you can make models appear MUCH bigger than they actually are. Nice!