Taking 360 VR screenshots for Google Cardboard projects in Unity

I’ve started working on an indie VR game project, and wanted to take some screenshots for its website. I’ve been playing with VR View for the Web, and thought it would be good to have some 360 VR screenshots of the game as well. 360 video would eventually be needed for a trailer too.

I went searching and initially couldn’t find something that worked for me. The Unity Asset Store has several free plugins that require Windows (well, compute shader support) - I’m using Mac OSX (now macOS). There was one that had some native libraries for capture (included OSX binaries) but I couldn’t get it to work - nothing was ever written to disk. There were one or two commercial solutions that while pretty affordable, they offered way too much - I just wanted to take a simple screenshot.

I started searching around GitHub and with the right keywords I stumbled upon this. I gave it a try, and with a few tweaks - it worked! Here is a sample of the output:

It’s pretty slow to capture on my Macbook Air. I think it might be doing a few things not so efficiently, but it works for my needs. I’ve forked it with all my changes here. I will be continuing to update it, and I hope this helps someone else out there looking to capture 360 VR images or video for their Unity project. In my case it’s a Google Cardboard game using the GoogleVR Unity SDK.

Note: I am using Unity 5.5.1f1 on macOS Sierra

If you’re looking to get a Google Cardboard headset, check out some reviews and recommendations I wrote here.