Get tooled up: Virtual Reality development

Enter the immersive dimension!

A creative curriculum isn’t complete without an immersive shot of VR! In June we’ll don a META headset and present a series of explainers to get up and running with VR development workflows.

Our explainer series will use the following software and assets. Some are paid assets, though only one paid asset is essential to completing this series:

  • UNITY, a realtime 3D development environment. Unity is FREE for personal use.
  • VRIF, the ‘Virtual Reality Interaction Framework’. This paid Unity asset is essential for this series. It helps to configure a scene for use with common VR headsets including the META QUEST series. It includes a set of easy to use interactions including picking up and holding objects, climbing a ladder, drawing on a board and shooting a gun.
  • Low Poly city. We’ll use this paid 3d asset as the basis for our VR environment. It’s just as easy to use a Cyberpunk city, farm, or haunted mansion instead so have a look at the free and paid environmental assets available in the Unity asset store.
  • DoTween Pro. This paid Unity asset makes it easy to add path-based animation to a scene. We’ll animate a vehicle to make it race around the city streets.
  • Animated people. We’ll use this paid asset to breathe life into the urban landscape. You could choose to include a realistic set of city workers or add a horde of zombies!

Here’s how the VR city could look at the end of the explainer series!

…or how about using a themed environment instead?

This series of explainers is NOT a general introduction to VR games development, though the workflows are relevant to designing interactive VR experiences. Get downloading and see you in June 🙂