Adding Media

VotanicXR provides features to play several types of media, such as image, audio, video and 360-degree video, in the VR world. This chapter introduces the how the media can be easily added into the application.

Tutorial Scene and Related Materials

Go to Assets > Votanic > VotanicXR_Tutorial > Tutorial06_Media and open the scene Media provided.

Media Player in VotanicXR

VotanicXR provides two types of media player prefabs for developers to easily add media to the VotanicXR application. The MediaPlayer prefab is for regular type media and the MediaPlayer360 is for 360-degree type media. The supported media formats are listed in the below table.

	MediaPlayer	MediaPlayer360
Type	Regular media	360-degree media
Audio	.wav, .ogg,
Image	.jpg, .png, .tga, .exr
Video	Refer to Unity Video File Compatibility	.mp4, .mov, .avi, .mkv, .asf, .webm

Regular Media Player

Adding the Media Player

1. Right-click in Hierarchy window, select vGear > GameObject > MediaPlayer. A MediaPlayer panel GameObject will be added in the project. You can adjust the position of the media play game object in the scene as you want.

   

Adding Media to the Media Player

1. In the Hierarchy windows, click GameObject MediaPlayer -> MediaPlayer and scroll down in the inspector window to find the Media Player (Script) script. The main media player properties can be configurated in the [Setting] section.

   

   A brief explanation of the media player properties is listed in below table.

   Property	Description
   Media	The media playlist configuration
   Ignore list	List of media names to ignore in the media playlist
   Auto Play	Enable to play media on the media player ready
   Auto Next	Enable to play the next media file automatically
   Random	Enable shuffling media in the playlist to play media on random sequence
   Loop	Configure various loop mode
   Volume	Configure the player volume, range [0 – 1]
   Mute	Enable to mute the audio
   DefaultTexture	Setup the media player default picture. (usually for playing audio)

2. Playlist can be defined in the [Settings] > Media property. Input size to create a list for the media files. For each element below, set the file path of the media in the Path property.

   Note: The Path can be a file, or a folder. If the path is a folder, the media player will create a playlist using all the media in the folder, sorted in alphabetical order. Keep in mind that, if the media are placed under the unity Assets folder, the playlist cannot be changed after the project is built. To allow loading the playlist dynamically, we recommend you using the StreamingAssts folder or a folder outside of the unity Assets folder as the media path.

   In the following step, we will demonstrate configuring the media player using both a unity asset folder path and an external folder path as an example.

   Under Media, set the Size to 2.

   For media in unity asset folder, set the Path to Assets/VotanicXR_Tutorial/Tutorial06/Resources/ in Element 0

   

   For media in external folder, set the Path to ../MediaResources/ in Element 1. Then, create a MediaResources folder next to the build folder.

   

   3. In addition, Ignore List can be set to filter the unwanted media, here we filter sample2.mp4 and 360.mp4.

   

   

   4. Play the scene and check the result. You can use the media control UI to control the playing of the media in the playlist.

   

360 Media Player

The MediaPlayer360 prefab is available in vGear for the playback of 360-degree video and images. The MediaPlayer360 is a huge spherical mesh with inverted normal, texture extracted from 360 media are mapped to the mesh so that user can view the media in 360 degrees.

Adding the 360 Media Player

To add the MediaPlayer360 prefab.

1. Right-click in the Hierarchy window, select vGear > GameObject > MediaPlayer360. A MediaPlayer360 spherical GameObject will be added to the project. the default position of the 360 media player is (0, 0, 0), for the better immersive experience, it is recommended to move the user to the center of the MediaPlayer360 player.

   

2. The steps to adding media to the MediaPlayer360 is the same as the regular media player. Please check the Adding Media to the Media Player section for details. You may use a 360-video sample for testing by inputting Assets/Votanic/VotanicXR_Tutorial 2018.4/Tutorial06_Media/Resources/360.mp4 into the [Settings] > Media > Element 0 > Path. The result will be as follows in the Scene Window.

   

Stereo Type for Media Player 360

By default, the MediaPlayer360 player plays monoscopic video, meaning the source 360 media content is not in 3D format. For playing Stereo 360 video, developer can change the StereoType via API function SetStereoType.

IEnumerator Start()
{
	yield return new WaitForSeconds(1f);
	if (mediaPlayer360 != null)
	{
		mediaPlayer360.SetStereoType(StereoType.DownUp);
	}
}

There are several stereo types None, DownUp, LeftRight, RightLeft, UpDown supported by the MediaPlayer360 player. It is required to set the stereo type according to the video format.